Across the plains, with other memories and essays

CopghtlJ".

! -^ O O

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION

OF THE WORKS OF

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
ACROSS THE PLAINS

WITH OTHER MEMORIES AND ESSAYS

THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION
OF STEVENSON'S WORKS

NOVELS AND ROMANCES

TREASURE ISLAND

PRINCE OTTO

KIDNAPPED

THE BLACK ARROW

THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE

THE WRONG BOX

THE WRECKER

DAVID BALFOUR

THE EBB-TIDE

WEIR OF HERMISTON

ST. IVES

SHORTER STORIES

NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS

THE DYNAMITER

THE MERRY MEN, containing DR.

JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
ISLAND NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS

ESSATS, TRAVELS, AND SKETCHES
AN INLAND VOYAGE
TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY
VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE
FAMILIAR STUDIES
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT, f»n/<j«w«n^

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
IN THE SOUTH SEAS
ACROSS THE PLAINS
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN THE
ART OF WRITING

POEMS
COMPLETE POEMS

Twenty-five volumes. Sold singly or in sets
Per vol.. Cloth, $1.00 ; Limp Leather, $f.2J net.

Charles Scribner's Sons, New York

BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION

ACROSS
THE PLAINS

WITH OTHER MEMORIES
AND ESSAYS

BY

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1905

I wo Oopies !ioct«vc\i I

AUG 17 iyU6
Oopyritriic cituy

I ' COPV •5.

^.^' : • — i^^^MiirK L'wfc w<r- r.r , - -;

Copyright, i8g2, igo^
By Charles Scribner's Sons

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

VJ

TO
PAUL BOURGET

Traveller and student and curious as you are, you will
never have heard the name of Vailima, most likely not even
that of Upolu, and Samoa itself may be strange to your ears.
To these barbaric seats there came the other day a yellow
book with your name on the title, and filled in every page
with the exquisite gifts of your art. Let me take and change
your own words : fai beau admirer les autres de toutes mes
forces^ c''est avec vous que je tjie co7nplais a vivre.

R. L. S.
Vailima,
Upolu,
Samoa.

LETTER TO THE AUTHOR

My Dear Stevenson :

You have trusted me with the choice and arrangement of
these papers, written before you departed to the South Seas,
and have asked me to add a preface to the volume. But it is
your prose the pubhc wish to read, not mine; and I am sure
they will willingly be spared the preface. Acknowledgments
are due in your name to the publishers of the several maga-
zines from which the papers are collected, viz. Fraser'^s, Long-
man''s, the Magazine of Art, and Scribner's. I will only add,
lest any reader should find the tone of the concluding pieces
less inspiriting than your wont, that they were written under
circumstances of especial gloom and sickness. " I agree with
you the lights seem a little turned down," so you write to me
now ; "the truth is I was far through, and came none too soon
to the South Seas, where I was to recover peace of body and
mind. And however low the lights, the stuff is true. . . ."
Well, inasmuch as the South Sea sirens have breathed new
life into you, we are bound to be heartily grateful to them,
though as they keep you so far removed from us, it is difficult
not to bear them a grudge; and if they would reconcile us
quite, they have but to do two things more — to teach you new
tales that shall charm us like your old, and to spare you, at
least once in a while in summer, to climates within reach of us
who are task-bound for ten months in the year beside the

Thames.

Yours ever,

SIDNEY COLVIN.
February, 1892.

CONTENTS'

Page

Across the Plains 3

The Old Pacific Capital 78

fontainebleau . . i09

Random Memories 144

Random Memories (Continued) 165

The Lantern-Bearers 183

A Chapter on Dreams 206

Beggars 231

Letter to a Young Gentleman 250

PuLvis ET Umbra 267

A Christmas Sermon 280

1 " Epilogue to 'An Inland Voyage'" has been transferred to
" An Inland Voyage " in this Edition.

ACROSS THE PLAINS

WITH OTHER MEMORIES AND ESSAYS

ACROSS THE PLAINS 5

I picked up my bundles and got under way, it was
only to exchange discomfort for downright misery
and danger.

I followed the porters into a long shed reaching
down-hill from West Street to the river. It was
dark, the wind blew clean through it from end to
end ; and here I found a great block of passengers
and baggage, hundreds of one and tons of the
other. I feel I shall have a difficulty to make my-
self believed; and certainly the scene must have
been exceptional, for it was too dangerous for
daily repetition. It was a tight jam; there was
no fair way through the mingled mass of brute
and living obstruction. Into the upper skirts of
the crowd porters, infuriated by hurry and over-
w^ork, clove their way with shouts. I may say that
we stood like sheep, and that the porters charged
among us like so many maddened sheep-dogs; and
I believe these men were no longer answerable for
their acts. It mattered not what they were carry-
ing, they drove straight into the press, and when
they could get no farther, blindly discharged their
barrowful. With my own hand, for instance, I

6 ACROSS THE PLAINS

saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother's
knee, she sitting on a box; and since I heard of
no accident, I must suppose that there were many
similar interpositions in the course of the evening.
It will give some idea of the state of mind to which
we were reduced if I tell you that neither the porter
nor the mother of the child paid the least attention
to my act. It was not till some time after that I
understood what I had done myself, for to ward off
heavy boxes seemed at the moment a natural in-
cident of human life. Cold, wet, clamour, dead
opposition to progress, such as one encounters in
an evil dream, had utterly daunted the spirits. We
had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the
conditions of the world. For my part, I shivered
a little, and my back ached wearily; but I believe
I had neither a hope nor a fear, and all the activ-
ities of my nature had become tributary to one
massive sensation of discomfort.

At length, and after how long an interval I
hesitate to guess, the crowd began to move, heavily
straining through itself. About the same time
some lamps w^ere lighted, and threw a sudden flare

ACROSS THE PLAINS 7

over the shed. We were being filtered out into
the river boat for Jersey City. You may imagine
how slowly this filtering proceeded, through the
dense, choking crush, every one overladen with
packages or children, and yet under the necessity
of fishing out his ticket by the way ; but it ended
at length for me, and I found myself on deck under
a flimsy awning and with a trifle of elbow-room
to stretch and breathe in. This was on the star-
board ; for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hope-
lessly on the port side, by which we had entered.
In vain the seamen shouted to them to move on,
and threatened them wath shipwreck. These poor
people were under a spell of stupor, and did not
stir a foot. It rained as heavily as ever, but the
wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not
without danger to a boat so badly ballasted as
ours ; and we crept over the river in the darkness,
trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded
duck, and passed ever and again by huge, illumi-
nated steamers running many knots, and heralding
their approach by strains of music. The contrast
between these pleasure embarkations and our ow^n

8 ACROSS THE PLAINS

grim vessel, with her hst to port and her freight
of wet and silent emigrants, was of that glaring
description which we count too obvious for the
purposes of art.

The landing at Jersey City was done in a stam-
pede. I had a fixed sense of calamity, and to judge
by conduct, the same persuasion was common to
us all. A panic selfishness, like that produced by
fear, presided over the disorder of our landing.
People pushed, and elbowed, and ran, the families
following how they could. Children fell, and were
picked up to be rewarded by a blow. One child,
who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and
with increasing shrillness, as though verging
towards a fit; an official kept her by him, but no
one else seemed so much as to remark her distress ;
and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the
rest. I was so weary that I had twice to make a
halt and set down my bundles in the hundred yards
or so between the pier and the railway station,
so that I was quite wet by the time that I got under
cover. There was no waiting-room, no refresh-
ment room ; the cars were locked ; and for at least

ACROSS THE PLAINS 9

another hour, or so it seemed, we had to camp
upon the draughty, gasht platform. I sat on my
vaHse, too crushed to observe my neighbours; but
as they were all cold, and wet, and weary, and
driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement to
which we had been subjected, I believe they can
have been no happier than myself. I bought half-
a-dozen oranges from a boy, for oranges and nuts
were the only refection to be had. As only two of
them had even a pretence of juice, I threw the
other four under the cars, and beheld, as in a
dream, grown people and children groping on the
track after my leavings.

At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly
dejected, and far from dry. For my own part,
I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed my trousers
as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed
my blood into the bargain; but no one else, ex-
cept my next neighbour to whom I lent the brush,
appeared to take the least precaution. As they
were, they composed themselves to sleep. I had
seen the lights of Philadelphia, and been twice
ordered to change carriages and twice counter-

lo ACROSS THE PLAINS

manded, before I allowed myself to follow their
example.

Tuesday. — When I awoke, it was already day ;
the train was standing idle; I was in the last car-
riage, and, seeing some others strolling to and fro
about the lines, I opened the door and stepped
forth, as from a caravan by the wayside. We were
near no station, nor even, as far as I could see,
within reach of any signal. A green, open, undu-
lating country stretched away upon all sides.
Locust trees and a single field of Indian corn
gave it a foreign grace and interest; but the con-
tours of the land were soft and English. It was
not cjuite England, neither was it quite France;
yet like enough either to seem natural in my eyes.
And it was in the sky, and not upon the earth, that
I was surprised to find a change. Explain it how
you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at
all, the sun rises with a different splendour in
America and Europe. There is more clear gold
and scarlet in our old country mornings; more
purple, brown, and smoky orange in those of the
new. It may be from habit, but to me the coming

ACROSS THE PLAINS ii

of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter;
it has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles
sunset; it seems to fit some subsequential, evening
epoch of the world, as though America were in
fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from the
orient of Aurora and the springs of day. I thought
so then, by the railroad side in Pennsylvania, and
I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant
parts of the continent. If it be an illusion it is one
very deeply rooted, and in which my eyesight is
accomplice.

Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and
accompanying its passage by the swift beating of
a sort of chapel bell upon the engine; and as it
was for this we had been waiting, we were sum-
moned by the cry of " All aboard ! " and went on
again upon our way. The whole line, it appeared,
was topsy-turvy; an accident at midnight having
thrown all the traffic hours into arrear. We paid
for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that
day. Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now
and then we had a few minutes at some station
with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for

•12 ACROSS THE PLAINS

sale; but we were so many and so ravenous that,
though I tried at every opportunity, the coffee was
always exhausted before I could elbow my way to
the counter.

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble
summer's day. There was not a cloud; the sun-
shine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys
among which we wound our way, the atmosphere
preserved a sparkling freshness till late in the
afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety
to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods,
rivers, and the delved earth. These, though in so
far a country, were airs from home. I stood on
the platform by the hour; and as I saw, one after
another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway
and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows
and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the
sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of
ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his
light dispersed and coloured by a thousand acci-
dents of form and surface, I began to exult with
myself upon this rise in life like a man who had
come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the

ACROSS THE PLAINS 13

name of a river from the brakesman, and heard
that it was cahed the Susquehanna, the beauty of
the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty
of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness
named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna
was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the
name, as no other could be, for that shining river
and desirable valley.

None can care for literature in itself who do not
take a special pleasure in the sound of names ; and
there is no part of the world where nomenclature
is so rich, poetical, humourous, and picturesque as
the United States of America. All times, races,
and languages have brought their contribution.
Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with Belle-
fontaine, and with Sandusky. Chelsea, with its
London associations of red brick, Sloane Square,
and the King's Road, is own suburb to stately and
primeval Memphis; there they have their seat,
translated names of cities, where the Mississippi
runs by Tennessee and Arkansas ; ^ and both,
while I was crossing the continent, lay, watched

1 Please pronounce Arkansaw, with the accent on the first.

14 ACROSS THE PLAINS

by armed men, in the horror and isolation of a
plague. Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian
arrowhead under a steam factory, below anglified
New York. The names of the States and Terri-
tories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most
romantic vocables : Delaware, Ohio, Indiana,
Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and
the Carolinas; there are few poems with a nobler
music for the ear : a songful, tuneful land ; and
if the new Homer shall arise from the Western
continent, his verse will be enriched, his pages sing
spontaneously, with the names of States and cities
that would strike the fancy in a business circular.

Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-
room at Pittsburg. I had now under my charge a
young and sprightly Dutch widow with her chil-
dren ; these I was to watch over providentially for
a certain distance farther on the way; but as I
found she was furnished with a basket of eatables.
I left her in the waiting-room to seek a dinner for
myself.

I mention this meal, not only because it w^as the
first of which I had partaken for about thirty

ACROSS THE PLAINS 15

hours, but because it was the means of my first
introduction to a coloured gentleman. He did me
the honour to wait upon me after a fashion, while
I was eating; and with every word, look, and ges-
ture marched me farther into the country of sur-
prise. He was indeed strikingly unlike the negroes
of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels
of my youth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly
somewhat dark, but of a pleasant warm hue, speak-
ing English with a slight and rather odd foreign
accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed
with manners so patronisingly superior that I am
at a loss to name their parallel in England. A
butler perhaps rides as high over the unbutlered,
but then he sets you right with a reserve and a sort
of sighing patience which one is often moved to
admire. And again, the abstract butler never
stoops to familiarity. But the coloured gentleman
will pass you a wink at a time ; he is familiar like
an upper form boy to a fag; he unbends to you
like Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He
makes himself at home and welcome. Indeed, I
may say, this waiter behaved himself to me

i6 ACROSS THE PLAINS

throughout that supper much as, with us, a young,
free, and not very self-respecting master might
behave to a good-looking chambermaid. I had
come prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him
at his ease, to prove in a thousand condescensions
that I was no sharer in the prejudice of race; but
I assure you I put my patronage away for another
occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that
result.

Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted
him upon a point of etiquette: if one should offer
to tip the American waiter ? Certainly not, he told
me. Never. It would not do. They considered
themselves too highly to accept. They would even
resent the offer. As for him and me, we had en-
joyed a very pleasant conversation; he, in par-
ticular, had found much pleasure in my society;
I was a stranger; this was exactly one of those
rare conjunctures. . . . Without being very clear-
seeing, I can still perceive the sun at noonday;
and the coloured gentleman deftly pocketed a
quarter.

Wednesday. — A little after midnight I convoyed

ACROSS THE PLAINS 17

my widow and orphans on board the train; and
morning found us far into Ohio. This had early
been a favourite home of my imagination ; I have
played at being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed
some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my
person being still unbreeched. My preference was
founded on a work which appeared in CasscU's
Family Paper, and was read aloud to me by my
nurse. It narrated the doings of one Custaloga,
an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter, very
obligingly washed the paint off his face and became
Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other ; a trick I never
forgave him. The idea of a man being an Indian
brave, and then giving that up to be a baronet,
was one which my mind rejected. It offended
verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of Robin-
son Crusoe and others to escape from uninhabited
islands.

But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it.
We were now on those great plains which stretch
unbroken to the Rocky Mountains. The country
was flat like Holland, but far from being dull. All
through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, or for

i8 ACROSS THE PLAINS

as much as I saw of them from the train and in
my waking moments, it was rich and various, and
breathed an elegance pecuhar to itself. The tall
corn pleased the eye; the trees were graceful in
themselves, and framed the plain into long, aerial
vistas; and the clean, bright, gardened townships
spoke of country fare and pleasant summer even-
ings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise;
but, I am afraid, not unfrequented by the devil.
That morning dawned with such a freezing chill
as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not perhaps
so measurable by instrument, as it struck home
upon the heart and seemed to travel with the blood.
Day came in with a shudder. White mists lay
thinly over the surface of the plain, as w^e see them
more often on a lake; and though the sun had
soon dispersed and drunk them up, leaving an
atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from
horizon to horizon, the mists had still been there,
and we knew that this paradise was haunted by
killing damps and foul malaria. The fences along
the line bore but two descriptions of advertisement ;
one to recommend tobaccos, and the other to vaunt

ACROSS THE PLAINS 19

remedies against the ague. At the point of day,
and while we were all in the grasp of that first chill,
a native of the State, who had got in at some way
station, pronounced it, with a doctoral air, '' a
fever and ague morning."

The Dutch widow was a person of some charac-
ter. She had conceived at first sight a great
aversion for the present writer, which she was at
no pains to conceal. But being a woman of a prac-
tical spirit, she made no dif^culty about accepting
my attentions, and encouraged me to buy her chil-
dren fruits and candies, to carry all her parcels,
and even to sleep upon the floor that she might
profit by my empty seat. Nay, she was such a
rattle by nature, and so powerfully moved to
autobiographical talk, that she was forced, for
want of a better, to take me into confidence and tell
me the story of her life. I heard about her late
husband, who seemed to have made his chief im-
pression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays.
I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the
amount of her fortune, the cost of her housekeep-
ing by the week, and a variety of particular matters

20 ACROSS THE PLAINS

that are not usually disclosed except to friends.
At one station, she shook up her children to look
at a man on the platform and say if he were not
like Mr. Z. ; while to me she explained how she
had been keeping company with this Mr. Z., how
far matters had proceeded, and how it was because
of his desistance that she was now travelling to the
west. Then, when I was thus put in possession
of the facts, she asked my judgment on that type
of manly beauty. I admired it to her heart's con-
tent. She was not, I think, remarkably veracious
in talk, but broidered as fancy prompted, and built
castles in the air out of her past; yet she had that
sort of candour, to keep me, in spite of all these
confidences, steadily aware of her aversion. Her
parting words were ingeniously honest. " I am
sure," said she, " we all ought to be very much
obliged to you." I cannot pretend that she put
me at my ease ; but I had a certain respect for sucji
a genuine dislike. A poor nature would have
slipped, in the course of these familiarities, into a
sort of worthless toleration for me.

We reached Chicago in the evening. I was

ACROSS THE PLAINS 21

turned out of the cars, bundled into an omnibus,
and driven off through the streets to the station of
a different railroad. Chicago seemed a great and
gloomy city. I remember having subscribed, let
us say sixpence, towards its restoration at the
period of the fire ; and now when I beheld street
after street of ponderous houses and crowds of
comfortable burghers, I thought it would be a
graceful act for the corporation to refund that six-
pence, or, at the least, to entertain me to a cheerful
dinner. But there was no word of restitution. I
was that city's benefactor, yet I w^as received in a
third-class waiting-room, and the best dinner I
could get was a dish of ham and eggs at my own
expense.

I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired
as that night in Chicago. When it was time to
start, I descended the platform like a man in a
dream. It was a long train, lighted from end to
end ; and car after car, as I came up with it, was
not only filled but overflowing. My valise, my
knapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous tomes
of Bancroft, weighed me double ; I was hot, fever-

22 ACROSS THE PLAINS

ish, painfully athirst; and there was a great
darkness over me, an internal darkness, not to be
dispelled by gas. When at last I found an empty
bench, I sank into it like a bundle of rags, the
world seemed to swim away into the distance, and
my consciousness dwindled within me to a mere
pin's head, like a taper on a foggy night.

When I came a little more to myself, I found
that there had sat down beside me a very cheerful,
rosy little German gentleman, somewhat gone in
drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to
the dozen, as they say. I did my best to keep up
the conversation; for it seemed to me dimly as if
something depended upon that. I heard him re-
late, among many other things, that there were
pickpockets on the train, who had already robbed
a man of forty dollars and a return ticket; but
though I caught the words, I do not think I prop-
erly understood the sense until next morning; and
I believe I replied at the time that I was very glad
to hear it. What else he talked about I have no
guess ; I remember a gabbling sound of words,
his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was

ACROSS THE PLAINS 23

highly explanatory; but no more. And I suppose
I must have shown my confusion very plainly ; for,
first, I saw him knit his brows at me like one who
has conceived a doubt ; next, he tried me in Ger-
man, supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar with
the English tongue ; and finally, in despair, he rose
and left me, I felt chagrined ; but my fatigue was
too crushing for delay, and, stretching myself as
far as that was possible upon the bench, I was
received at once into a dreamless stupor.

The little German gentleman was only going a
little way into the suburbs after a diner fin, and
was bent on entertainment while the journey
lasted. Having failed with me, he pitched next
upon another emigrant, who had come through
from Canada, and was not one jot less weary than
myself. Nay, even in a natural state, as I found
next morning when we scraped acquaintance, he
was a heavy, uncommunicative man. After trying
him on different topics, it appears that the little
German gentleman flounced into a temper, swore
an oath or two, and departed from that car in quest
of livelier society. Poor little gentleman ! I sup-

24 ACROSS THE PLAINS

pose he thought an emigrant should be a rolhcking,
free-hearted blade, with a flask of foreign brandy
and a long, comical story to beguile the moments
of digestion.

Thursday. — I suppose there must be a cycle in
the fatigue of travelling, for when I awoke next
morning, I was entirely renewed in spirits and ate
a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk,
and coffee and hot cakes, at Burlington upon the
Mississippi. Another long day's ride followed,
with but one feature w^orthy of remark. At a
place called Creston, a drunken man got in. He
was aggressively friendly, but, according to Eng-
lish notions, not at all unpresentable upon a train.
For one stage he eluded the notice of the officials ;
l^ut just as wx were beginning to move out of the
next station, Cromwell by name, by came the
conductor. There was a word or two of talk ; and
then the official had the man by the shoulders,
twitched him from his seat, marched him through
the car, and sent him flying on to the track. It was
done in three motions, as exact as a piece of drill.
The train was still moving slowly, although be-

ACROSS THE PLAINS 25

ginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got
his feet without a fall. He carried a red bundle,
though not so red as his cheeks; and he shook this
menacingly in the air with one hand, while the
other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys.
It was the first indication that I had come amonsf
revolvers, and I observed it with some emotion.
The conductor stood on the steps with one hand
on his hip, looking back at him ; and perhaps this
attitude imposed upon the creature, for he turned
without further ado, and went off staggering along
the track towards Cromwell, followed by a peal
of laughter from the cars. They were speaking
English all about me, but I knew I w^as in a
foreign land.

Twenty minutes before nine that night, w^e were
deposited at the Pacific Transfer Station near
Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank of the Missouri
River. Here we were to stay the night at a kind
of caravanserai, set apart for emigrants. But I
gave way to a thirst for luxury, separated myself
from my companions, and marched with my effects
into the Union Pacific Hotel. A white clerk and

i6 ACROSS THE PLAINS

a coloured gentleman whom, in my plain European
way, I should call the boots, were installed behind
a counter like bank tellers. They took my name,
assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with
my packages. And here came the tug of war.
I wished to give up my packages into safe keep-
ing; but I did not wish to go to bed. And this,
it appeared, was impossible in an American hotel.
It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding,
and sprang from my unfamiliarity with the lan-
guage. For although two nations use the same
words and read the same books, intercourse is not
conducted by the dictionary. The business of life
is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, each
with a special and almost a slang signification.
Some international obscurity prevailed between me
and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs ; so
that what I was asking, which seemed very nat-
ural to me, appeared to him a monstrous exigency.
He refused, and that with the plainness of the
West. This American manner of conducting mat-
ters of business is, at first, highly unpalatable to
the European. When we approach a man in the

ACROSS THE PLAINS 27

way of his calling, and for those services by which
he earns his bread, we consider him for the time
being our hired servant. But in the American
opinion, two gentlemen meet and have a friendly
talk with a view to exchanging favours if they
shall agree to please. I know not which is the
more convenient, nor even which is the more truly
courteous. The English stiffness unfortunately
tends to be continued after the particular trans-
action is at an end, and thus favours class sepa-
rations. But on the other hand, these equalitarian
plainnesses leave an open field for the insolence
of Jack-in-office.

I was nettled by the coloured gentleman's re-
fusal, and unbuttoned my wrath under the simili-
tude of ironical submission. I knew nothing, I
said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had
no desire to give trouble. If there was nothing
for it but to get to bed immediately, let him say
the word, and though it was not my habit, I should
cheerfully obey.

He burst into a shout of laughter. " Ah ! " said
he, " you do not know about America. They are

28 ACROSS THE PLAINS

fine people in America. Oh! you will like them
very well. But you must n't get mad. I know
what you want. You come along with me."

And issuing from behind the counter, and taking
me by the arm like an old acquaintance, he led
me to the bar of the hotel.

" There," said he, pushing me from him by the
shoulder, " go and have a drink ! "

THE EMIGRANT TRAIN

All this while I had been travelling by mixed
trains, where I might meet with Dutch widows
and little German gentry fresh from table. I had
been but a latent emigrant ; now I was to be
branded once more, and put apart with my fel-
lows. It was about two in the afternoon of Friday
that I found myself in front of the Emigrant
House, with more than a hundred others, to be
sorted and boxed for the journey. A white-haired
official, with a stick under one arm, and a list in
the other hand, stood apart in front of us, and
called name after name in the tone of a command.
At each name you would see a family gather up

ACROSS THE PLAINS 29

its brats and bundles and run for the hindmost of
the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon
conckided that this was to be set apart for the
women and children. The second or central car, •
it turned out, was devoted to men travelling alone,
and the third to the Chinese. The official was
easily moved to anger at the least delay; but the
emigrants were both quick at answering their
names, and speedy in getting themselves and their
effects on board.

The families once housed, we men carried the
second car without ceremony by simultaneous as-
sault. I suppose the reader has some notion of an
American railroad car, that long, narrow wooden
box, like a flat-roofed Noah's ark, with a stove
and a convenience, one at either end, a passage
down the middle, and transverse benches upon
either hand. Those destined for emigrants on the
Union Pacific are only remarkable for their ex-
treme plainness, nothing but w^ood entering in any
part into their constitution, and for the usual in-
efficacy of the lamps, which often went out and
shed but a dying glimmer even while they burned.

30 ACROSS THE PLAINS

The benches are too short for anything but a young
child. Where there is scarce elbow-room for two
to sit, there will not be space enough for one to
lie. Hence the company, or rather, as it appears
from certain bills about the Transfer Station, the
company's servants, have conceived a plan for the
better accommodation of travellers. They prevail
on every two to chum together. To each of the
chums they sell a board and three square cushions
stuffed with straw, and covered with thin cotton.
The benches can be made to face each other in
pairs, for the backs are reversible. On the ap-
proach of night the boards are laid from bench to
bench, making a couch wide enough for two, and
long enough for a man of the middle height ; and
the chums lie down side by side upon the cushions
with the head to the conductor's van and the feet
to the engine. When the train is full, of course
this plan is impossible, for there must not be more
than one to every bench, neither can it be carried
out unless the chums agree. It was to bring about
this last condition that our white-haired official
now bestirred himself. He made a most active

ACROSS THE PLAINS 31

master of ceremonies, introducing likely couples,
and even guaranteeing the amiability and honesty
of each. The greater the number of happy couples
the better for his pocket, for it was he who sold
the raw material of the beds. His price for one
board and three straw cushions began with two
dollars and a half; but before the train left, and,
I am sorry to say, long after I had purchased
mine, it had fallen to one dollar and a half.

The match-maker had a difficulty with me ; per-
haps, like some ladies, I showed myself too eager
for union at any price ; but certainly the first who
was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined the
honour without thanks. He was an old, heavy,
slow-spoken man, I think from Yankeeland, looked
me all over with great timidity, and then began to
excuse himself in broken phrases. He did n't know
the young man, he said. The young man might
be very honest, but how was he to know that?
There was another young man whom he had met
already in the train; he guessed he was honest,
and would prefer to chum with him upon the
whole. All this without any sort of excuse, as

32 ACROSS THE PLAINS

though I had been inanimate or absent. I began
to tremble lest every one should refuse my com-
pany, and I be left rejected. But the next in turn
was a tall, strapping, long-limbed, small-headed,
curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a sol-
dierly smartness in his manner. To be exact, he
had acquired it in the navy. But that was all one ;
he had at least been trained to desperate resolves,
so he accepted the match, and the white-haired
swindler pronounced the connubial benediction, and
pocketed his fees.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in making
up the train. I am afraid to say how many bag-
gage-waggons followed the engine, certainly a
score; then came the Chinese, then we, then the
families, and the rear was brought up by the con-
ductor in what, if I have it rightly, is called his
caboose. The class to which I belonged was of
course far the largest, and we ran over, so to
speak, to both sides ; so that there were some
Caucasians among the Chinamen, and some bach-
elors among the families. But our own car was
pure from admixture, save for one little boy of

ACROSS THE PLAINS 33

eight or nine, who had the whooping-cough. At
last, about six, the long train crawled out of the
Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri
River to Omaha, westward bound.

It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the
cars. There was thunder in the air, which helped
to keep us restless. A man played many airs upon
the cornet, and none of them were much attended
to, until he came to " Home, Sweet Home." It was
truly strange to note how the talk ceased at that,
and the faces began to lengthen. I have no idea
whether musically this air is to be considered good
or bad; but it belongs to that class of art which
may be best described as a brutal assault upon the
feelings. Pathos must be relieved by dignity of
treatment. If you wallow naked in the pathetic,
like the author of "Home, Sweet Home," you make
your hearers weep in an unmanly fashion ; and
even while yet they are moved, they despise them-
selves and hate the occasion of their weakness. It
did not come to tears that night, for the experi-
ment was interrupted. An elderly, hard-looking
man, with a goatee beard and about as much

34 ACROSS THE PLAINS

appearance of sentiment as you would expect from
a retired slaver, turned with a start and bade the
performer stop that '' damned thing." " I 've
heard about enough of that," he added ; " give us
something about the good country we 're going
to." A murmur of adhesion ran round the car;
the performer took the instrument from his lips,
laughed and nodded, and then struck into a danc-
ing measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled
immediately the emotion he had raised.

The day faded ; the lamps were lit ; a party of
wild young men, who got off next evening at
North Platte, stood together on the stern platform,
singing " The Sweet By-and-by " with very tune-
ful voices ; the chums began to put up their beds ;
and it seemed as if the business of the day were
at an end. But it was not so; for, the train
stopping at some station, the cars were instantly
thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young
men and maidens, some of them in little more than
nightgear, some with stable lanterns, and all offer-
ing beds for sale. Their charge began with twenty-
five cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went

ACROSS THE PLAINS 3s

on again, to fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or
less than one-fifth of what I had paid for mine at
the Transfer. This is my contribution to the econ-
omy of future emigrants.

A great personage on an American train is the
newsboy. He sells books (such books!), papers,
fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant jour-
neys, soap, towels, tin washing-dishes, tin cofTee-
pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables,
mostly hash or beans and bacon. Early next
morning the newsboy went around the cars, and
chumming on a more extended principle became
the order of the hour. It requires but a copartnery
of two to manage beds ; but washing and eating
can be carried on most economically by a syndi-
cate of three. I myself entered a little after sun-
rise into articles of agreement, and became one of
the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Du-
buque. Shakespeare was my own nickname on
the cars ; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow ; and
Dubuque, the name of a place in the State of
Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going west
to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by

36 ACROSS THE PLAINS

incessantly chewing or smoking, and sometimes
chewing and smoking together. I have never seen
tobacco so silHly abused. Shakespeare bought a
tin washing-dish, Dubuque a towel, and Pennsyl-
vania a brick of soap. The partners used these
instruments, one after another, according to the
order of their first awaking; and when the firm
had finished there was no want of borrowers.
Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite
the stove, and retired with the whole stock in
trade to the platform of the car. There he knelt
down, supporting himself by a shoulder against
the woodwork or one elbow crooked about the
railing, and made a shift to wash his face and
neck and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if the
train is moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous
toilet.

On a similar division of expense, the firm of
Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque supplied
themselves with coffee, sugar, and necessary ves-
sels ; and their operations are a type of what went
on through all the cars. Before the sun was up
the stove would be brightly burning; at the first

ACROSS THE PLAINS 37

station the natives would come on board with milk
and eggs and coffee-cakes ; and soon from end to
end the car would be filled with little parties break-
fasting upon the bed-boards. It was the pleasant-
est hour of the day.

There were meals to be had, however, by the
wayside : a breakfast in the morning, a dinner
somewhere between eleven and two, and supper
from five to eight or nine at night. We had rarely
less than twenty minutes for each; and if we had
not spent many another twenty minutes waiting
for some express upon a side track among miles
of desert, we might have taken an hour to each
repast and arrived at San Francisco up to time.
For haste is not the foible of an emigrant train.
It gets through on sufferance, running the gauntlet
among its more considerable brethren ; should
there be a block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed;
and they cannot, in consequence, predict the length
of the passage within a day or so. Civility is the
main comfort that you miss. Equality, though
conceived very largely in America, does not extend
so low down as to an emigrant. Thus in all other

38 ACROSS THE PLAINS

trains, a warning cry of " All aboard ! " recalls
the passengers to take their seats; but as soon as
I was alone with emigrants, and from the Transfer
all the way to San Francisco, I found this cere-
mony was pretermitted; the train stole from the
station without note of warning, and you had to
keep an eye upon it even while you ate. The an-
noyance is considerable, and the disrespect both
wanton and petty.

Many conductors, again, will hold no communi-
cation with an emigrant. I asked a conductor one
day at what time the train would stop for dinner;
as he made no answer I repeated the question,
with a like result; a third time I returned to the
charge, and then Jack-in-office looked me coolly
in the face for several seconds and turned osten-
tatiously away. I believe he was half ashamed of
his brutality; for Avhen another person made the
same inquiry, although he still refused the infor-
mation, he condescended to answer, and even to
justify his reticence in a voice loud enough for
me to hear. It was, he said, his principle not to
tell people where they were to dine; for one

ACROSS THE PLAINS 39

answer led to many other questions, as what o'clock
it was? or, how soon should we be there? and he
could not afford to be eternally worried.

As you are thus cut off from the superior au-
thorities, a great deal of your comfort depends on
the character of the newsboy. He has it in his
power indefinitely to better and brighten the emi-
grant's lot. The newsboy with whom we started
from the Transfer was a dark, bullying, contempt-
uous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us like dogs.
Indeed, in his case, matters came nearly to a fight.
It happened thus : he was going his rounds through
the cars with some commodities for sale, and com-
ing to a party who were at Scvcn-np or Cascino
(our two games), upon a bed-board, slung down
a cigar-box in the middle of the cards, knocking
one man's hand to the floor. It was the last straw.
In a moment the whole party were upon their feet,
the cigars were upset, and he was ordered to " get
out of that directly, or he would get more than
he reckoned for." The fellow grumbled and mut-
tered, but ended by making off, and was less
openly insulting in the future. On the other hand,

40 ACROSS THE PLAIxNS

the lad who rode with us in this capacity from
Ogden to Sacramento made himself the friend of
all, and helped us with information, attention, as-
sistance, and a kind countenance. He told us
where and when we should have our meals, and
how long the train would stop ; kept seats at table
for those who were delayed, and watched that we
should neither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily
hurried. You, who live at home at ease, can
hardly realise the greatness of this service, even
had it stood alone. When I think of that lad
coming and going, train after train, with his
bright face and civil words, I see how easily a
good man may become the benefactor of his kind.
Perhaps he is discontented with himself, perhaps
troubled with ambitions ; why, if he but knew it,
he is a hero of the old Greek stamp ; and while
he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few cents,
and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a man's
work and bettering the world.

I must tell here an experience of mine with an-
other newsboy. I tell it because it gives so good
an example of that uncivil kindness of the Ameri-

ACROSS THE PLAINS 41

can, which is perhaps their most bewildering char-
acter to one newly landed. It was immediately
after I had left the emigrant train ; and I am told
I looked like a man at death's door, so much had
this long journey shaken me. I sat at the end of
a car, and the catch being broken, and myself
feverish and sick, I had to hold the door open with
my foot for the sake of air. In this attitude my
leg debarred the newsboy from his box of mer-
chandise. I made haste to let him pass when I
observed that he was coming; but I was busy
with a book, and so once or twice he came upon
me unawares. On these occasions he most rudely
struck my foot aside ; and though I myself apol-
ogised, as if to show him the way, he answered me
never a word. I chafed furiously, and I fear the
next time it would have come to words. But sud-
denly I felt a touch upon my shoulder, and a large
juicy pear was put into my hand. It was the news-
boy, who had observed that I was looking ill and
so made me this present out of a tender heart. For
the rest of the journey I was petted like a sick
child; he lent me newspapers, thus depriving him-

42 ACROSS THE PLAINS

self of his legitimate profit on their sale, and came
repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up.

THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA

It had thundered on the Friday night, but the
sun rose on Saturday without a cloud. We were
at sea — there is no other adequate expression —
on the plains of Nebraska. I made my observatory
on the top of a fruit-waggon, and sat by the hour
upon that perch to spy about me, and to spy in
vain for something new. It was a world almost
without a feature ; an empty sky, an empty earth ;
front and back, the line of railway stretched from
horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-
board ; on either hand, the green plain ran till it
touched the skirts of heaven. Along the track
innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a
crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous flower-bed;
grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all
degrees of distance and diminution ; and now and
again we might perceive a few dots beside the rail-
road which grew more and more distinct as we
drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins,

ACROSS THE PLAINS 43

and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until
they me4ted into their surroundings, and we were
once more alone upon the billiard-board. The
train toiled over this infinity like a snail ; and being
the one thing moving, it was wonderful what huge
proportions it began to assume in our regard. It
seemed miles in length, and either end of it within
but a step of the horizon. Even my own body or
my own head seemed a great thing in that empti-
ness. I note the feeling the more readily as it is
the contrary of what I have read of in the experi-
ence of others. Day and night, above the roar of
the train, our ears were kept busy with the in-
cessant chirp of grasshoppers — a noise like the
winding up of countless clocks and watches, which
began after awhile to seem proper to that land.

To one hurrying through by steam there was a
certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy, this
greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole
arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line
of the horizon. Yet one could not but reflect upon
the weariness of those who passed by there in old
days, at the foot's pace of oxen, painfully urging

44 ACROSS THE PLAINS

their teams, and with no landmark but that unat-
tainable evening sun for which they steefed, and
which daily fled them by an equal stride. They
had nothing, it would seem, to overtake; nothing
by which to reckon their advance; no sight for
repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage,
only the dead green waste underfoot, and the
mocking, fugitive horizon. But the eye, as I have
been told, found differences even here; and at the
worst the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the
end of his toil. It is the settlers, after all, at whom
we have a right to marvel. Our consciousness, by
which we live, is itself but the creature of variety.
Upon what food does it subsist in such a land?
What livelihood can repay a human creature for
a life spent in this huge sameness? He is cut off
from books, from news, from company, from all
that can relieve existence but the prosecution of
his affairs. A sky full of stars is the most varied
spectacle that he can hope. He may walk five miles
and see nothing; ten, and it is as though he had
not moved; twenty, and still he is in the midst
of the same great level, and has approached no

ACROSS THE PLAINS 45

nearer to the one object within view, the flat
horizon which keeps pace with his advance. We
are full at home of the question of agreeable wall-
papers, and wise people are of opinion that the
temper may be quieted by sedative surroundings.
But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler?
His is a wall-paper with a vengeance — one quar-
ter of the universe laid bare in all its gauntness.
His eye must embrace at every glance the whole
seeming concave of the visible world ; it quails
before so vast an outlook, it is tortured by distance ;
yet there is no rest or shelter, till the man runs
into his cabin, and can repose his sight upon things
near at hand. Hence, I am told, a sickness of
the vision peculiar to these empty plains.

Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadse, sum-
mer and winter, cattle, wife and family, the settler
may create a full and various existence. One per-
son at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in
every way superior to her lot. This was a woman
who boarded us at a way station, selling milk. She
was largely formed ; her features were more than
comely ; she had that great rarity — a fine com-

46 ACROSS THE PLAINS

plexion which became her; and her eyes were
kind, dark, and steady. She sold milk with patri-
archal grace. There was not a line in her coun-
tenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice,
but spoke of an entire contentment with her life.
It would have been fatuous arrogance to pity such
a woman. Yet the place where she lived was to
me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden
houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood
planted along the railway lines. Each stood apart
in its own lot. Each opened direct off the billiard-
board, as if it were a billiard-board indeed, and
these only models that had been set down upon it
ready made. Her own, into which I looked, was
clean but very empty, and showed nothing home-
like but the burning fire. This extreme newness,
above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a
strong impression of artificiality. With none of
the litter and discolouration of human life; with
the paths unworn, and the houses still sweating
from the axe, such a settlement as this seems
purely scenic. The mind is loath to accept it for
a piece of reality; and it seems incredible that life

' ACROSS THE PLAINS 47

can go on with so few properties, or the great
child, man, find entertainment in so bare a play-
room.

And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in
some points ; or at least it contained, as I passed
through, one person incompletely civilised. At
North Platte, where we supped that evening, one
man asked another to pass the milk- jug. This
other was well dressed and of what we should call
a respectable appearance; a darkish man, high
spoken, eating as though he had some usage of
society; but he turned upon the first speaker with
extraordinary vehemence of tone

" There 's a waiter here ! " he cried.

" I only asked you to pass the milk," explained
the first.

Here is the retort verbatim

" Pass ! Hell ! I 'm not paid for that business ;
the waiter 's paid for it. You should use civility
at table, and, by God, I '11 show you how ! "

The other man very wisely made no answer, and
the bully went on with his supper as though noth-
ing had occurred. It pleases me to think that some

48 ACROSS THE PLAINS

day soon he will meet with one of his own kidney;
and that perhaps both may fall.

THE DESERT OF WYOMING

To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for
the mountains. I longed for the Black Hills of
Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to enter,
like an ice-bound whaler for the spring. Alas ! and
it was a worse country than the other. All Sunday
and Monday we travelled through these sad moun-
tains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies, which
is a fair match to them for misery of aspect. Hour
after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly
w^orld about our onward path ; tumbled boulders,
cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of monuments
and fortifications — how drearily, how tamely,
none can tell who has not seen them ; not a tree,
not a patch of sward, not one shapely or com-
manding mountain form ; sage-brush, eternal
sage-brush; over all, the same weariful and gloomy
colouring, greys warming into brown, greys dark-
ening towards black ; and for sole sign of life,
liere and there a few fleeing antelopes; here and

ACROSS THE PLAINS 49

there, but at incredible intervals, a creek running
in a canon. The plains have a grandeur of their
own ; but here there is nothing but a contorted
smallness. Except for the air, which was light
and stimulating, there was not one good circum-
stance in that God-forsaken land.

I had been suffering in my health a good deal
all the way; and at last, Avhether I was exhausted
by my complaint or poisoned in some wayside
eating-house, the evening we left Laramie, I fell
sick outright. That was a night which I shall not
readily forget. The lamps did not go out ; each
made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood,
and the shadows were confounded together in the
long, hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay in
uneasy attitudes ; here two chums alongside, flat
upon their backs like dead folk; there a man
sprawling on the floor, with his face upon his arm ;
there another half seated with his head and shoul-
ders on the bench. The most passive were con-
tinually and roughly shaken by the movement of
the train ; others stirred, turned, or stretched out
their arms like children ; it w-as surprising how

50 ACROSS THE PLAINS

many groaned and murmured in their sleep; and
as I passed to and fro, stepping across the pros-
trate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a
half-formed word, it gave me a measure of the
worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle.
Although it was chill, I was obliged to open my
window, for the degradation of the air soon became
intolerable to one who was awake and using the
full supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering night,
I saw the black, amorphous hills shoot by un-
weariedly into our wake. They that long for
morning have never longed for it more earnestly
than I.

And yet when day came, it was to shine upon
the same broken and unsightly quarter of the
world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird, or
a river. Only down the long, sterile caiions, the
train shot hooting and awoke the resting echo.
That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly
land ; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit
to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature.
And when I think how the railroad has been
pushed through this unwatered wilderness and

ACROSS THE PLAINS 51

haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear an emi-
grant for some £12 from the Atlantic to the Golden
Gates; how at each stage of the construction,
roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and
death, sprang up and then died away again, and
are now but wayside stations in the desert ; how in
these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates
worked side by side with border ruffians and
broken men from Europe, talking together in a
mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking,
quarrelling and murdering like wolves; how the
plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in
this last fastness, the scream of the " bad medicine
waggon " charioting his foes ; and then when I go
on to remember that all this epical turmoil was con-
ducted by gentlemen in frock coats, and with a
view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune
and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I
own, as if this railway were the one typical achieve-
ment of the age in which we live, as if it brought
together into one plot all the ends of the world and
all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some
great writer the busiest, the most extended, and

52 ACROSS THE PLAINS

the most varied subject for an enduring literary
work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be
heroism that we require, what was Troy town to
this ? But, alas ! it is not these things that are
necessary — it is only Homer.

Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some
god who conducts us swiftly through these shades
and by so many hidden perils. Thirst, hunger, the
sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more
feared, so lightly do we skim these horrible lands ;
as the gull, who wings safely through the hurri-
cane and past the shark. Yet we should not be
forgetful of these hardships of the past ; and to
keep the balance true, since I have complained of
the trifling discomforts of my journey, perhaps
more than was enough, let me add an origiuill
document. It was not written by Homer, but by
a boy of eleven, long since dead, and is dated only
twenty years ago. I shall punctuate, to make
things clearer, but not change the spelling.

"My dear sister Mary, — I am afraid you will go nearly-
crazy when you read my letter. If Jerry" (the writer's eldest
brother) "has not written to you before now, you will be sur-
prised to heare that we are in California, and that poor

ACROSS THE PLAINS ^3

Thomas" (another brother, of fifteen) " is dead. We started

from in July, with plenty of provisions and too yoke

oxen. We went along very well till we got within six or
seven hundred miles of California, when the Indians attacked
us. We found places where they had killed the emigrants.
We had one passenger with us, too gung, and one revolver; so
we ran all the lead We had into bullets (and) hung the guns
up in the wagon so that we could get at them in a minit. It
was about two o'clock in the afternoon; droave the cattel a
little way ; when a prairie chicken alited a little way from the
wagon.

"Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it, and told Tom
to drive the oxen. Tom and I drove the oxen, and Jerry and
the passenger went on. Then, after a little, I left Tom and
caught up with Jerry and the other man. Jerry stopped for
Tom to come up ; me and the man went on and sit down by a
little stream. In a few minutes, we heard some noise; then
three shots (they all struck poor Tom, I suppose); then they
gave the war hoop, and as many as twenty of the red skins
came down upon us. The three that shot Tom was hid by
the side of the road in the bushes.

" I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot ; so I told the
other man that Tom and Jerry were dead, and that we had
better try to escape, if possible. I had no shoes on ; having
a sore foot, I thought I would not put them on. The man
and me run down the road, but We was soon stopt by an In-
dian on a pony. We then turend the other way, and run up
the side of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedar trees,
and stayed there till dark. The Indians hunted all over after
us, and verry close to us, so close that we could here there
tomyhawks Jingle. At dark the man and me started on, I

54 ACROSS THE PLAINS

stubing my toes against sticks and stones. We traveld on all
night ; and next morning, Just as it was getting gray, we saw
something in the shape of a man. It layed Down in tlie grass.
We went up to it, and it was Jerry. He thought we ware In-
dians. You can imagine how glad he was to see me. He
thought we was all dead but him, and we thought him and
Tom was dead. He had the gun that he took out of the
wagon to shoot the prairie Chicken; all he had was the load
that was in it.

'' We traveld on till about eight o'clock, We caught up with
one wagon with too men with it. We had traveld with them
before one day; we stopt and they Drove on; we knew that
they was ahead of us, unless they had been killed to. My feet
was so sore when we caught up with them that I had to ride ;
I could not step. We traveld on for too days, when the men
that owned the cattle said they would (could) not drive them
another inch. We unyoked the oxen ; we had about seventy
pounds of flour; we took it out and divided it into four packs.
Each of the men took about i8 pounds apiece and a blanket.
I carried a little bacon, dried meat, and little quilt ; I had in
all about twelve pounds. We had one pint of flour a day for
our alloyance. Sometimes we made soup of it; sometimes we
(made) pancakes; and sometimes mixed it up with cold water
and eat it that way. We traveld twelve or fourteen days.
The time came at last when we should have to reach some
place or starve. We saw fresh horse and cattle tracks. The
morning come, we scraped all the flour out of the sack, mixed
it up, and baked it into bread, and made some soup, and eat
everything we had. We traveld on all day without anything to
eat, and that evening we Caught up with a sheep train of eight
wagons. We traveld with them till we arrived at the settle-

ACROSS THE PLAINS S5

ments ; and know I am safe in California, and got to good
home, and going to school.

" Jerry is working in . It is a good country. You

can get from 50 to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking. Tell me
all about the affairs in the States, and how all the folks get
along."

And so ends this artless narrative. The Httle
man was at school again, God bless him, while
his brother lay scalped upon the deserts.

FELLOW-PASSENGERS

At Ogden we changed cars from the Union
Pacific to the Central Pacific line of railroad. The
change was doubly welcome; for, first, we had
better cars on the new line ; and, second, those in
which we had been cooped for more than ninety
hours had begun to stink abominably. Several
3^ards away, as we returned, let us say from din-
ner, our nostrils w^ere assailed by rancid air. I
have stood on a platform while the whole train
was shunting ; and as the dwelling-cars drew near,
there would come a whiff of pure menagerie, only
a little sourer, as from men instead of monkeys.
I think we are human only in virtue of open

S6 ACROSS THE PLAINS

windows. Without fresh air, yon only require a bad
heart, and a remarkable command of the Queen's
English, to become such another as Dean Swift;
a kind of leering, human goat, leaping and wag-
ging your scut on mountains of offence. I do my
best to keep my head the other way, and look for
the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-
like business of the emigrant train. But one thing
I must say, the car of the Chinese was notably the
least offensive.

The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice
as high, and so proportionally airier; they were
freshly varnished, which gave us all a sense of
cleanliness as though we had bathed; the seats
drew out and joined in the centre, so that there
was no more need for bed-boards ; and there was
an upper tier of berths which could be closed by
day and opened at night.

I had by this time some opportunity of seeing
the people whom I was among. They were in
rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had met
on board ship while crossing the Atlantic. They
were mostly lumpish fellows, silent and noisy, a

ACROSS THE PLAINS 57

common combination ; somewhat sad, I should say,
with an extraordinary poor taste in humour, and
httle interest in their fellow-creatures beyond that
of a cheap and merely external curiosity. If they
heard a man's name and business, they seemed to
think they had the heart of that mystery; but
they were as eager to know that much as they
were indifferent to the rest. Some of them were
on nettles till they learned your name was Dick-
son and you a journeyman baker ; but beyond that,
whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or
clever, fierce or friendly, was all one to them.
Others who were not so stupid, gossiped a little,
and, I am bound to say, unkindly. A favourite
witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm of
" All aboard ! " while the rest of us were dining,
thus contributing his mite to the general discom-
fort. Such a one was always much applauded for
his high spirits. When I was ill coming through
Wyoming, I was astonished — fresh from the
eager humanity on board ship — to meet with little
but laughter. One of the young men even amused
himself by incommoding me, as was then very

58 ACROSS THE PLAINS

easy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere clod-
like incapacity to think, for he expected me to join
the laugh. I did so, but it was phantom merri-
ment. Later on, a man from Kansas had three
violent epileptic fits, and though, of course, there
were not wanting some to help him, it was rather
superstitious terror than sympathy that his case
evoked among his fellow-passengers. " Oh, I hope
he 's not going to die ! '' cried a woman; " it would
be terrible to have a dead body ! " And there was
a very general movement to leave the man behind
at the next station. This, by good fortune, the
conductor negatived.

There was a good deal of story-telling in some
quarters ; in others, little but silence. Li this
society, more than any other that ever I was in,
it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the
narrative. It was rarely that any one listened for
the listening. If he lent an ear to another man's
story, it was because he was in immediate want
of a hearer for one of his own. Food and the
progress of the train were the subjects most gen-
erally treated; many joined to discuss these who

ACROSS THE PLAINS 59

otherwise would hold their tongues. One small
knot had no better occupation than to worm out
of me my name; and the more they tried, the
more obstinately fixed I grew to baffle them. They
assailed me with artful questions and insidious
offers of correspondence in the future; but I was
perpetually on my guard, and parried their as-
saults with inward laughter. I am sure Dubuque
would have given me ten dollars for the secret.
He owed me far more, had he understood life,
for thus preserving him a lively interest through-
out the journey. I met one of my fellow-passen-
gers months after, driving a street tramway car
in San Francisco; and, as the joke was ;iow out
of season, told him my name without subterfuge.
You never saw a man more chopfallen. But had
my name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a
mystery he had still been disappointed.

There were no emigrants direct from Europe —
save one German family and a knot of Cornish
miners who kept grimly by themselves, one read- '
ing the New Testament all day long through steel
spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets

6o ACROSS THE PLAINS

of their old-world, mysterious race. Lady Hester
Stanhope believed she could make something great
of the Cornish; for my part, I can make nothing
of them at all. A division of races, older and
more original than that of Babel, keeps this close,
esoteric family apart from neighbouring English-
men. Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign
in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel
— that some of the strangest races dwell next door
to you at home.

The rest were all American born, but they came
from almost every quarter of that continent. All
the States of the North had sent out a fugitive to
cross the plains with me. From Virginia, from
Pennsylvania, from New York, from far western
Iowa and Kansas, from Maine that borders on
the Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves —
some one or two were fleeing in quest of a better
land and better wages. The talk in the train, like
the talk I heard on the steamer, ran upon hard
times, short commons, and hope that moves ever
westward. I thought of my shipful from Great
Britain with a feeling of despair. They had come

ACROSS THE PLAINS 6i

3000 miles, and yet not far enough. Hard times
bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to wel-
come them at Sandy Hook. Where were they to
go? Pennsylvania, Maine, Iowa, Kansas? These
were not places for immigration, but for emigra-
tion, it appeared ; not one of them, but I knew a
man who had lifted up his heel and left it for an
ungrateful country. And it was still westward
that they ran. Hunger, you would have thought,
came out of the east like the sun, and the evening
was made of edible gold. And, meantime, in the
car in front of me, were there not half a hundred
emigrants from the opposite quarter? Hungry
Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their
gates in search of provender, had here come face
to face. The two waves had met; east and west
had alike failed; the whole round world had been
prospected and condemned ; there was no El Do-
rado anywhere; and till one could emigrate to the
moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently at home.
Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more
picturesque and more disheartening; for, as we
continued to steam westward toward the land of

62 ACROSS THE PLAINS

gold, we were continually passing other emigrant
trains upon the journey east; and these were as
crowded as our own. Had all these return voy-
agers made a fortune in the mines? Were they
all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter?
It would seem not, for, whenever we met them,
the passengers ran on the platform and cried to
us through the windows, in a kind of wailing
chorus, to " Come back." On the plains of Ne-
braska, in the mountains of Wyoming, it was still
the same cry, and dismal to my heart, " Come
back ! " That was what we heard by the way
" about the good country we were going to."
And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San Fran-
cisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the
echo from the other side of Market Street was
repeating the rant of demagogues.

If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages
that men emigrate, how many thousands would
regret the bargain ! But wages, indeed, are only
one consideration out of many ; for we are a
race of gipsies, and love change and travel for
themselves.

ACROSS THE PLAINS 61,

DESPISED RACES

Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my
fellow-Caucasians towards our companions in the
Chinese car was the most stupid and the w^orst.
They seemed never to have looked at them, lis-
tened to them, or thought of them, but hated them
a priori. The Mongols were their enemies in that
cruel and treacherous battlefield of money. They
could work better and cheaper in half a hundred
industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle
for the Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe.
They declared them hideous vermin, and affected
a kind of choking in the throat when they beheld
them. Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese
man is so like a large class of European women,
that on raising my head and suddenly catching
sight of one at a considerable distance, I have for
an instant been deceived by the resemblance. I do
not say it is the most attractive class of our women^
but for all that many a man's wife is less pleasantly
favoured. Again, my emigrants declared that the
Chinese were dirty. I cannot say they were clean,

64 ACROSS THE PLAINS

for that was impossible upon the journey; but in
their efforts after cleanhness they put the rest of
us to shame. We all pigged and stewed in one
infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a minute
daily on the platform, and were unashamed. But
the Chinese never lost an opportunity, and you
would see them washing their feet — an act not
dreamed of among ourselves — and going as far
as decency permitted to wash their whole bodies.
I may remark by the way that the dirtier people
are in their persons the more delicate is their sense
of modesty. A clean man strips in a crowded
boathouse ; but he who is unwashed slinks in and
out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin.
Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Caucasians
entertained the surprising illusion that it was the
Chinese waggon, and that alone, which stank. I
have said already that it was the exception, and
notably the freshest of the three.

These judgments are typical of the feeling in all
Western America. The Chinese are considered
stupid, because they are imperfectly acquainted
with English. They are held to be base, because

ACROSS THE PLAINS 6s

their dexterity and frugality enable them to under-
bid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They are said
to be thieves ; I am sure they have no monopoly
of that. They are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon
and the cheerful Irishman may each reflect before
he bears the accusation. I am told, again, that
they are of the race of river pirates, and belong to
the most despised and dangerous class in the Celes-
tial Empire. But if this be so, what remarkable
pirates have we here ! and what must be the virtues,
the industry, the education, and the intelligence of
their superiors at home!

Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese
that must go. Such is the cry. It seems, after all,
that no country is bound to submit to immigration
any more than to invasion : each is war to the
knife, and resistance to either but legitimate de-
fence. Yet we may regret the free tradition of
the republic, which loved to depict herself with
open arms, welcoming all unfortunates. And cer-
tainly, as a man who believes that he loves free-
dom, I may be excused some bitterness when I

find her sacred name misused in the contention.

5

66 ACROSS THE PLAINS

It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar
fellow in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune of San
Francisco, roaring for arms and butchery. " At
the call of Abreham Lincoln," said the orator, " ye
rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes ;
can ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few
dhirty Mongolians ? "

For my own part, I could not look but with
wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their fore-
fathers watched the stars before mine had begun
to keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which
the other day we imitated, and a school of manners
which we never had the delicacy so much as to
desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past an-
tiquity. They walk the earth with us, but it
seems they must be of different clay. They hear
the clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a
different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance,
yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts
and superstitions as might check the locomotive in
its course. Whatever is thought within the circuit
of the Great Wall ; what the wry-eyed, spectacled
schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin ;

ACROSS THE PLAINS 67

religions so old that our language looks a halfling
boy alongside; philosophy so wise that our best
philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all
this travelled alongside of me for thousands of
miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if
we had one common thought or fancy all that way,
or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon
the same design, beheld the same world out of the
railway windows. And when either of us turned
his thoughts to home and childhood, wdiat a
strange dissimilarity must there not have been in
these pictures of the mind — when I beheld that
old, grey, castled city, high throned above the iirth,
W'ith the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat
sentry pacing over all ; and the man in the next
car to me would conjure up some junks and a
pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, wath
the same affection, home.

Another race shared among m)^ fellow-passen-
gers in the disfavour of the Chinese; and that, it
is hardly necessary to say, was the noble red man
of old story — he over whose own hereditary con-
tinent w^e had been steaming all these days. I saw

68 ACROSS THE PLAINS

no wild or independent Indian ; indeed, I hear that
such avoid the neighbourhood of the train ; but
now and again at way stations, a husband and wife
and a few children, disgracefully dressed out with
the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared
upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their
conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their ap-
pearance, would have touched any thinking crea-
ture, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested
round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I was
ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We
should carry upon our consciences so much, at
least, of our forefathers' misconduct as we con-
tinue to profit by ourselves.

If oppression drives a wise man mad, what
should be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes,
who have been driven back and back, step after
step, their promised reservations torn from them
one after another as the States extended westward,
until at length they are shut up into these hideous
mountain deserts of the centre — and even there
find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out
by ruffianly diggers? The eviction of the Chero-

ACROSS THE PLAINS e()

kees (to name but an instance), the extortion of
Indian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the ill-
faith of all, nay, down to the ridicule of such poor
beings as were here with me upon the train, make
up a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a
man must be in some ways base if his heart will
suffer him to pardon or forget. These old, well-
founded, historical hatreds have a savour of no-
bility for the independent. That the Jew should
not love the Christian, nor the Irishman love the
English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought
of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature
of man; rather, indeed, honourable, since it de-
pends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not
personal to him who cherishes the indignation.

TO THE GOLDEN GATES

A LITTLE corner of Utah. is soon traversed, and
leaves no particular impressions on the mind. By
an early hour on Wednesday morning we stopped
to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak,
high-lying plateau in Nevada. The man who kept
the station eating-house was a Scot, and learning

70 ACROSS THE PLAINS

that I was the same, he grew very friendly, and
gave me some advice on the country I was now
entering. " You see," said he, '' I tell you this,
because I come from your country." Hail, brither
Scots !

His most important hint was on the moneys of
this part of the world. There is something in the
simplicity of a decimal coinage which is revolting
to the human mind ; thus the French, in small
affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence ; and you have
to solve, by a spasm of mental arithmetic, such
posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred
halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made
a bolder push for complexity, and settle their
affairs by a coin that no longer exists — the bit,
or old Mexican real. The supposed value of the
bit is twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar.
When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollar
stands for the required amount. But how about an
odd bit? The nearest coin to it is a dime, which
is short by a fifth. That, then, is called a short bit.
If you have one, you lay it triumphantly down,
and save two and a half cents. But if you have

ACROSS THE PLAINS 71

not, and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or
shopman calmly tenders you a dime by way of
change; and thus you have paid what is called a
long hit, and lost two and a half cents, or even,
by comparison with a short bit, five cents. In
country places all over the Pacific coast, nothing
lower than a bit is ever asked or taken, which
vastly increases the cost of life; as even for a
glass of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-
half penny, as the case may be. You w^oulcl say
that this system of mutual robbery was as broad
as it was long; but I have discovered a plan to
make it broader, with which I here endow the
public. It is brief and simple — radiantly simple.
There is one place where five cents are recognised,
and that is the post-ofiice. A quarter is only worth
two bits, a short and a long. Whenever you have
a quarter, go to the post-office and buy five cents'
worth of postage-stamps ; you will receive in
change two dimes, that is, two short bits. The
purchasing power of your money is undimin-
ished. You can go and have your two glasses
of beer all the same ; and you have made your-

72 ACROSS THE PLAINS

self a present of live cents' worth of postage-
stamps into the bargain. Benjamin Frankhn
would have patted me on the head for this
discovery.

From Toano we travelled all day through
deserts of alkali and sand, horrible to man, and
bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier,
and came by supper-time to Elko. As we were
standing, after our manner, outside the station,
I saw two men whip suddenly from underneath
the cars, and take to their heels across country.
They were tramps, it appeared, who had been
riding on the beams since eleven of the night
before; and several of my fellow-passengers had
already seen and conversed with them while we
broke our fast at Toano. These land stowaways
play a great part over here in America, and I
should have liked dearly to become acquainted
with them.

At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was
coming out from supper, when I was stopped by
a small, stout, ruddy man, followed by two others
taller and ruddier than himself.

ACROSS THE PLAINS 73

" Ex-cuse me, sir," he said, " but do you happen
to be going on ? "

I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to
persuade me to desist from that intention. He
had a situation to offer «me, and if we could come
to terms, why, good and wxll. '' You see," he con-
tinued, " I 'm running a theatre here, and we 're
a httle short in the orchestra. You 're a musi-
cian, I guess ? "

I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary ac-
cjuaintance with '' Auld Lang Syne " and '' The
Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension what-
ever to that style. He seemed much put out of
countenance; and one of his taller companions
asked him, on the nail, for five dollars.

" You see, sir," added the latter to me, '' he bet
you were a musician ; I bet you were n't. No
offence, I hope? "

" None whatever," I said, and the two with-
drew to the bar, wdiere I presume the debt was
liquidated.

This little adventure woke bright hopes in my
fellow-travellers, who thought they had now come

74 ACROSS THE PLAINS

to a country where situations went a-begging. But
I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith.
Indeed, I am more than half persuaded it was but
a feeler to decide the bet.

Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for
the best of all reasons, that I remember no more
than that we continued through desolate and desert
scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But some time
after I had fallen asleep that night, I was awak-
ened by one of my companions. It was in vain
that I resisted. A fire of enthusiasm and whisky
burned in his eyes; and he declared we were in a
new country, and I must come forth upon the plat-
form and see with my own eyes. The train was
then, in its patient way, standing halted in a by-
track. It was a clear, moonlit night ; but the
valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine
direct, and only a diffused glimmer whitened the
tall rocks and relieved the blackness of the pines.
A hoarse clamour filled the air ; it was the con-
tinuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at
hand among the mountains. The air struck chill,
but tasted good and vigorous in the nostrils — a

ACROSS THE PLAINS 75

fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere. I was dead
sleepy, but I returned to roost with a grateful
mountain feeling at my heart.

When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for
awhile to know if it were day or night, for the
illumination was unusual. I sat up at last, and
found we were grading slowly downward through
a long snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an
open ; and before we were swallowed into the next
length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a
huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming
river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of
dawn. I am usually very calm over the displays
of nature ; but you will scarce believe how my heart
leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I
had come home again — home from unsightly
deserts to the green and habitable corners of the
earth. Every spire of pine along the hill-top, every
trouty pool along that mountain river, was more
dear to me than a blood relation. Few people
have praised God more happily than I did. And
thenceforward, down by Blue Cafion, Alta, Dutch
Flat, and all the old mining camps, through a sea

76 ACROSS THE PLAINS

of mountain forests, dropping thousands of fcst
toward the far sea-level as we went, not I only,
but all the passengers on board, threw off their
sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled
like schoolboys, and thronged with shining eyes
upon the platform and became new creatures
within and without. The sun no longer oppressed
us with heat, it only shone laughingly along the
mountain-side, until we were fain to laugh our-
selves for glee. At every turn we could see farther
into the land and our own happy futures. At
every town the cocks were tossing their clear notes
into the golden air, and crowing for the new day
and the new country. For this was indeed our
destination; this was " the good country " w^e had
been going to so long.

By afternoon w^e were at Sacramento, the city
of gardens in a plain of corn ; and the next day
before the dawn w^e were lying to upon the Oak-
land side of San Francisco Bay. The day was
breaking as we crossed the ferry; the fog was
rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the
bay was perfect — not a ripple, scarce a stain,

ACROSS THE PLAINS 77

upon its blue expanse; everything was waiting,
breathless, for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold lit
first upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened
downward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed
to awaken, and began to sparkle ; and suddenly

" The tall hills Titan discovered,"

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold

and corn, were lit from end to end with summer

daylight.

[1879.]

THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC

TFIE Bay of Monterey has been compared
by no less a person than General Sher-
man to a bent fishing-hook ; and the com-
parison, if less important than the march through
Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier for topog-
raphy. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank ; the
mouth of the Salinas River is at the middle of the
bend ; and Monterey itself is cosily ensconced
beside the barb. Thus the ancient capital of Cali-
fornia faces across the bay, while the Pacific Ocean,
though hidden by low hills and forests, bombards
her left flank and rear with never-dying surf. In
front of the town, the long line of sea-beach trends
north and northwest, and then westward to enclose
the bay. The waves which lap so quietly about the
jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the
distance; you can see the breakers leaping high

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 79

and white by day; at night, the outhne of the
shore is traced in transparent silver by the moon-
hght and the flying foam; and from all round,
even in quiet weather, the low, distant, thrilling
roar of the Pacific hangs over the coast and the
adjacent country like smoke above a battle.

These long beaches are enticing to the idle man.
It would be hard to find a walk more solitary,
and at the same time more exciting to the mind.
Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea.
Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the re-
tiring waves, trilling together in a chorus of infini-
tesimal song. Strange sea-tangles, new to the
European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes
a whole whale's carcase, white with carrion-gulls
and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there
along the sands. The waves come in slowly, vast
and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst
with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and
waning, up and down the long key-board of the
beach. The foam of these great ruins mounts in
an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly
fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next

8o OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

breaker. The interest is perpetually fresh. On
no other coast that I know shall you enjoy, in
calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's
greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or
such degrees of thunder in the sound. The very
air is more than usually salt by this Homeric
deep.

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the
beach. Here and there a lagoon, more or less
brackish, attracts the birds and hunters. A rough,
spotty undergrowth partially conceals the sand.
The crouching, hardy live-oaks flourish singly or
in thickets — the kind of wood for murderers to
crawl among — and here and there the skirts of
the forest extend downward from the hills with a
floor of turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung
with Spaniard's Beard. Through this quaint des-
ert the railway cars drew near to Monterey from
the junction at Salinas City — though that and so
many other things are now for ever altered — and
it was from here that you had the first view of
the old township lying in the sands, its white wind-
mills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the

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first fogs of the evening drawing drearily around
it from the sea.

The one common note of all this country is the
haunting presence of the ocean. A great faint
sound of breakers follows you high up into the
inland canons; the roar of water dwells in the
clean, empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon
the chimney; go w^here you will, you have but to
pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific.
You pass out of the town to the southwest, and
mount the hill among pine woods. Glade, thicket,
and grove surround you. You follow winding
sandy tracks that lead nowhither. You see a deer ;
a multitude of quail arises. But the sound of the
sea still follows you as you advance, like that of
wind among the trees, only harsher and stranger
to the ear; and when at length you gain the sum-
mit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened
vigour, that same unending, distant, whispering
rumble of the ocean ; for now you are on the top of
Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only
mounts to you from behind along the beach

towards Santa Cruz, but from your right also,

6

82 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and
from down before you to the mouth of the Car-
mello River. The whole woodland is begirt w^ith
thundering surges. The silence that immediately
surrounds you where you stand is not so much
broken as it is haunted by this distant, circling
rumour. It sets your senses upon edge ; you strain
your attention ; you are clearly and unusually con-
scious of small sounds near at hand; you walk
listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of
the Pacific is a sort of disquieting company to you
in your walk.

When once I was in these woods I found it
difficult to turn homeward. All woods lure a
rambler onward; but in those of Monterey it was
the surf that particularly invited me to prolong my
walks. I would push straight for the shore where
I thought it to be nearest. Indeed, there was
scarce a direction that would not, sooner or later,
have brought me forth on the Pacific. The empti-
ness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and
discovery in these excursions. I never in all my
visits met but one man. He was a Mexican, very

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 83

dark of hue, but smiling and fat, and he carried
an axe, though his true business at that moment
was to seek for straying cattle. I asked him what
o'clock it was, but he seemed neither to know nor
care ; and when he in his turn asked me for
news of his cattle, I showed myself equally indif-
ferent. We stood and smiled upon each other for
a few seconds, and then turned without a word
and took our several w^ays across the forest.

One day — I shall never forget it — I had taken
a trail that was new to me. After awhile the
woods began to open, the sea to sound nearer
hand. I came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a
stile. A step or two farther, and, without leaving
the woods, I found myself among trim houses. I
walked through street after street, parallel and at
right angles, paved with sward and dotted with
trees, but still undeniable streets, and each with its
name posted at the corner, as in a real town.
Facing down the main thoroughfare — " Central
Avenue," as it was ticketed — I saw an open-air
temple, with benches and sounding-board, as
though for an orchestra. The houses were all

84 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

tightly sliuttered; there was no smoke, no sound
but of the waves, no moving thing. I have never
be^n in any place that seemed so dreamlike. Pom-
peii is all in a bustle with visitors, and its antiquity
and strangeness deceive the imagination ; but this
town had plainly not been built above a year or
two, and perhaps had been deserted over-night.
Indeed, it was not so much like a deserted town as
like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with
no one on the boards. The barking of a dog led
me at last to the only house still occupied, where
a Scotch pastor and his wife pass the winter alone
in this empty theatre. The place was " The Pacific
Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort."
Thither, in the warm season, crowds come to enjoy
a life of teetotalism, religion, and flirtation, which
I am willing to think blameless and agreeable. The
neighbourhood at least is well selected. The Pa-
cific booms in front. Westward is Point Pinos,
with the lighthouse in a wilderness of sand, where
you will find the lightkeeper playing the piano,
making models and bows and arrows, studying
dawn and sunrise in amateur oil-painting, and with

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 85

a dozen other elegant pursuits and interests to sur-
prise his brave, old-country rivals. To the east,
and still nearer, you will come upon a space of open
down, a hamlet, a haven among rocks, a world of
surge and screaming sea-gulls. Such scenes are
very similar in different climates; they appear
homely to the eyes of all ; to me this was like a
dozen spots in Scotland. And yet the boats that
ride in the haven are of strange outlandish design ;
and, if you walk into the hamlet, you will behold
costumes and faces and hear a tongue that are
unfamiliar to the memory. The joss-stick burns,
the opium pipe is smoked, the floors are strewn
with slips of coloured paper — prayers, you would
say, that had somehow missed their destination —
and a man guiding his upright pencil from right
to left across the sheet, writes home the news of
Monterey to the Celestial Empire.

The woods and the Pacific rule between them the
climate of this seaboard region. On the streets of
Monterey, when the air does not smell salt from the
one, it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous
treetops of the other. For days together a hot.

86 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

dry air will overhang the town, close as from an
oven, yet healthful and aromatic in the nostrils.
The cause is not far to seek, for the woods are
afire, and the hot wind is blowing from the hills.
These fires are one of the great dangers of Cali-
fornia. I have seen from AI outer ey as many as
three at the same time, by day a cloud of smoke,
by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance.
A little thing will start them, and, if the wind be
favourable, they gallop over miles of country faster
than a horse. The inhabitants must turn out and
work like demons, for it is not only the pleasant
groves that are destroyed ; the climate and the soil
are equally at stake, and these fires prevent the
rains of the next winter and dry up perennial foun-
tains. California has been a land of promise in
its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue
so swiftly to perish, it may become, like Palestine,
a land of desolation.

To visit the w^oods while they are languidly
burning is a strange piece of experience. The fire
passes through the underbrush at a run. Every
here and there a tree flares up instantaneously

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 87

from root to summit, scattering tufts of flame, and
is quenched, it seems, as quickly. But this last is
only in semblance. For after this first squib-like
conflagration of the dry moss and twigs, there
remains behind a deep-rooted and consuming fire
in the very entrails of the tree. The resin of the
pitch-pine is principally condensed at the base of
the bole and in the spreading roots. Thus, after
the light, showy, skirmishing flames, w^iich are
only as the match to the explosion, have already
scampered down the wind into the distance, the
true harm is but beginning for this giant of the
woods. You may approach the tree from one side,
and see it, scorched indeed from top to bottom,
but apparently survivor of the peril. Make the cir-
cuit, and there, on the other side of the column,
is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an
ulcer; while underground, to their most extended
fibre, the roots are being eaten out by fire, and the
smoke is rising through the fissures to the surface.
A little while, and, without a nod of warning, the
huge pine-tree snaps off short across the ground
and falls prostrate with a crash. Meanwhile the

88 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

fire continues its silent business; the roots are
reduced to a fine ash ; and long afterwards, if you
pass by, you will find the earth pierced with radi-
ating galleries, and preserving the design of all
these subterranean spurs, as though it were the
mould for a new tree instead of the print of an old
one. These pitch-pines of Monterey are, with the
single exception of the Monterey cypress, the most
fantastic of forest trees. No words can give an
idea of the contortion of their growth; they might
figure without change in a circle of the nether hell
as Dante pictured it ; and at the rate at which trees
grow, and at which forest fires spring up and
gallop through the hills of California, we may look
forward to a time when there will not be one of
them left standing in that land of their nativity.
At least they have not so much to fear from the
axe, but perish by what may be called a natural
although a violent death ; while it is man in his
short-sighted greed that robs the country of the
nobler red-wood. Yet a little while and perhaps
all the hills of sea-board California may be as bald
as Tamalpais.

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 89

I have an interest of my own in these forest
fires, for I came so near to lynching on one occa-
sion, that a braver man might have retained a thrill
from the experience. I wished to be certain
whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal orna-
ment of Calif ornian forests, which blazed up so
rapidly when the flame first touched the tree. I
suppose I must have been under the influence of
Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for my
experiment, what should I do but walk up to a
great pine-tree in a portion of the wood which had
escaped so much as scorching, strike a match, and
apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels. The
tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds
it was a roaring pillar of fire. Close by I could
hear the shouts of those who were at work com-
bating the original conflagration. I could see the
waggon that had brought them tied to a live-oak
in a piece of open; I could even catch the flash of
an axe as it swung up through the underwood into
the sunlight. Had any one observed the result of
my experiment my neck was literally not worth a
pinch of snuff; after a few minutes of passionate

90 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

expostulation I should have been run up to a
convenient bough.

To die for faction is a common evil;

But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day.
At night I went out of town, and there was my
own particular fire, quite distinct from the other,
and burning as I thought with even greater vigour.
But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct
and obvious power upon the climate. At sunset,
for months together, vast, wet, melancholy fogs
arise and come shoreward from the ocean. From
the hill-top above Monterey the scene is often
noble, although it is always sad. The upper air is
still bright with sunlight; a glow still rests upon
the Gabelano Peak ; but the fogs are in possession
of the lower levels ; they crawl in scarves among
the sand-hills ; they float, a little higher, in clouds
of a gigantic size and often of a wild configuration ;
to the south, where they have struck the seaward
shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they
double back and spire up skyward like smoke.
Where their shadow touches, colour dies out of the

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 91

world. The air grows chill and deadly as they
advance. The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin
to sigh, and all the windmills in Monterey are
whirling and creaking and filling their cisterns
wath the brackish water of the sands. It takes but
a little while till the invasion is complete. The sea,
in its lighter order, has submerged the earth.
Monterey is curtained in for the night in thick, wet,
salt, and frigid clouds, so to remain till day re-
turns ; and before the sun's rays they slowly dis-
perse and retreat in broken squadrons to the bosom
of the sea. And yet often when the fog is thickest
and most chill, a few steps out of the town and up
the slope, the night will be dry and warm and full
of inland perfume.

MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS

The history of Monterey has yet to be written.
Founded by Catholic missionaries, a place of wise
beneficence to Indians, a place of arms, a Mexican
capital continually wrested by one faction from
another, an American capital when the first House
of Representatives held its deliberations, and then

92 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

falling lower and lower from the capital of the
State to the capital of a county, and from that
again, by the loss of its charter and town lands, to
a mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline is
typical of that of all Mexican institutions and
even Mexican families in California.

Nothing is stranger in that strange State than
the rapidity with which the soil has changed hands.
The Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and land-
less, like their former capital ; and yet both it and
they hold themselves apart and preserve their
ancient customs and something of their ancient
air.

The town, when I was there, was a place of two
or three streets, economically paved with sea-sand,
and two or three lanes, which were watercourses
in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent up
by lissures four or five feet deep. There were no
street lights. Short sections of wooden sidewalk
only added to the dangers of the night, for they
were often high above the level of the roadway,
and no one could tell where they would be likely
to begin or end. The houses were, for the most

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 93

part, built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them
old for so new a country, some of very elegant
proportions, with low, spacious, shapely rooms,
and walls so thick that the heat of summer never
dried them to the heart. At the approach of the
rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyard smell
began to hang about the lower floors ; and diseases
of the chest are common and fatal among house-
keeping people of either sex.

There was no activity but in and around the
saloons, where people sat almost all day long play-
ing cards. The smallest excursion was made on
horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main
street without a horse or two tied to posts, and
making a line figure with their Mexican housings.
It struck me oddly to come across some of the
Conihill illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's Ercma,
and see all the characters astride on English sad-
dles. As a matter of fact, an English saddle is
a rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say,
a thing unknown in all the rest of California. In
a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you
saw not only Mexican saddles but true Vaquero

94 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

riding — men always at the hand-gallop up hill
and down dale, and round the sharpest corner,
urging their horses with cries and gesticulations
and cruel rotatory spurs, checking them dead with
a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a
square yard. The type of face and character of
bearing are surprisingly un-American. The first
ranged from something like the pure Spanish, to
something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure
Indian, although I do not suppose there was one
pure blood of either race in all the country. As for
the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise
to find, in that world of absolutely mannerless
Americans, a people full of deportment, solemnly
courteous, and doing all things with grace and
decorum. In dress they ran to colour and bright
sashes. Not even the most Americanised could
always resist the temptation to stick a red rose into
his hat-band. Not even the most Americanised
would descend to wear the vile dress hat of civili-
sation. Spanish was the language of the streets.
It was dif^cult to get along without a word or two
of that language for an occasion. The only com-

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 95

munications in which the population joined were
with a view to amusement. A weekly public ball
took place with great etiquette, in addition to the
numerous fandangoes in private houses. There
was a really fair amateur brass band. Night after
night serenaders would be going about the street,
sometimes in a company and with several instru-
ments and voices together, sometimes severally,
each guitar before a different window. It w^as a
strange thing to lie awake in nineteenth-century
America, and hear the guitar accompany, and one
of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love songs
mount into the night air, perhaps in a deep
baritone, perhaps in that high-pitched, pathetic,
womanish alto which is so common among Mexi-
can men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed
car as something not entirely human but altogether
sad.

The town, then, was essentially and wholly
Mexican ; and yet almost all the land in the neigh-
bourhood was held by Americans, and it was from
the same class, numerically so small, that the prin-
cipal officials were selected. This Mexican and that

96 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

Mexican would describe to you his old family
estates, not one rood of which remained to him.
You would ask him how that came about, and elicit
some tangled story back-foremost, from which you
gathered that the Americans had been greedy like
designing men, and the Mexicans greedy like chil-
dren, but no other certain fact. Their merits and
their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the
former landholders. It is true they were improvi-
dent, and easily dazzled with the sight of ready
money; but they were gentlefolk besides, and that
in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat
Yankee craft. Suppose they have a paper to sign,
they would think it a reflection on the other party
to examine the terms with any great minuteness ;
nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause,
it is ten to one they would refuse from delicacy
to object to it. I know I am speaking within
the mark, for I have seen such a case occur, and
the Mexican, in spite of the advice of his lawyer,
has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb. To
have spoken in the matter, he said, above all to
have let the other party guess that he had seen a

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 97

lawyer, would have " been like doubting his word."
The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who
have been brought up to understand all business
as a competition in fraud, and honesty itself to be
a virtue which regards the carrying out but not
the creation of agreements. This single unworldly
trait will account for much of that revolution of
which we are speaking. The Mexicans have the
name of being great swindlers, but certainly the
accusation cuts both ways. In a contest of this
sort, the entire booty would scarcely have passed
into the hands of the more scrupulous race.

Physically the Americans have triumphed ; but
it is not entirely seen how far they have themselves
been morally conquered. This is, of course, but a
part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in
the course of being solved in the various States of
the American Union. I am reminded of an anec-
dote. Some years ago, at a great sale of wine, all
the odd lots were purchased by a grocer in a small
way in the old town of Edinburgh. The agent
had the curiosity to visit him some time after and
inquire what possible use he could have for such

98 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

material. He was shown, by way of answer, a
huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Glad-
stone to imperial Tokay, were fermenting together.
" And what," he asked, " do you propose to call
this?" "I'm no very sure," replied the grocer,
" but I think it 's going to turn out port." In the
older Eastern States, I think we may say that this
hotch-potch of races is going to turn out English,
or thereabout. But the problem is indefinitely
varied in other zones. The elements are differently
mingled in the south, in what we may call the Ter-
ritorial belt, and in the group of States on the
Pacific coast. Above all, in these last, \yq may look
to see some monstrous hybrid — whether good or
evil, who shall forecast? but certainly original and
all their own. In my little restaurant at Monterey,
we have sat down to table day after day, a French-
man, two Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and
a Scotchman : we had for common visitors an
American from Illinois, a nearly pure blood Indian
woman, and a naturalised Chinese ; and from time
to time a Switzer and a German came down from
country ranches for the night. No wonder that

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL ^^

the Pacific coast is a foreign land to visitors from
the Eastern States, for each race contributes some-
thing of its own. Even the despised Chinese have
taught the youth of CaHfornia, none indeed of
their virtues, but the debasing use of opium.
And chief among these influences is that of the
Mexicans.

The Mexicans although in the State are out of
it. They still preserve a sort of international inde-
pendence, and keep their affairs snug to them-
selves. Only four or five years ago Vasquez, the
bandit, his troops being dispersed and the hunt too
hot for him in other parts of California, returned
to his native Monterey, and was seen publicly in
her streets and saloons, fearing no man. The year
that I was there there occurred two reputed mur-
ders. As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile
speakers of each other and of every one behind his
back, it is not possible for me to judge how much
truth there may have been in these reports ; but in
the one case every one believed, and in the other
some suspected, that there had been foul play ; and

nobody dreamed for an instant of taking the author-
LofC.

loo OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

ities into their counsel. Now this is, of course,
characteristic enough of the Mexicans ; but it is
a noteworthy feature that all the Americans in
Monterey acquiesced without a word in this inac-
tion. Even when I spoke to them upon the sub-
ject, they seemed not to understand my surprise;
they had forgotten the traditions of their own race
and upbringing, and become, in a word, wholly
Mexicanised.

Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money
to speak of, rely almost entirely in their business
transactions upon each other's worthless paper.
Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from
the equally penniless Miguel. It is a sort of local
currency by courtesy. Credit in these parts has
passed into a superstition. I have seen a strong,
violent man struggling for months to recover a
debt, and getting nothing but an exchange of waste
paper. The very storekeepers are averse to asking
for cash payments, and are more surprised than
pleased when they are offered. They fear there
must be something under it, and that you mean to
withdraw your custom from them. I have seen

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL loi

the enterprising chemist and stationer begging me
with fervour to let my account run on, although
I had my purse open in my hand ; and partly from
the commonness of the case, partly from some
remains of that generous old Mexican tradition
which made all men welcome to their tables, a per-
son may be notoriously both unwilling and unable
to pay, and still find credit for the necessaries of
life in the stores of Monterey. Now this villain-
ous habit of living upon " tick " has grown into
Californian nature. I do not mean that the Ameri-
can and European storekeepers of Monterey are as
lax as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers
in many parts of the State expect unlimited credit,
and profit by it in the meanwhile, without a
thought for consequences. Jew storekeepers have
already learned the advantage to be gained from
this ; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable
indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their
bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the
whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except
that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you
may see Americans bound in the same chains with

102 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

which they themselves had formerly bound the
Mexican. It seems as if certain sorts of follies,
like certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil
rather than to the race that holds and tills it for
the moment.

In the meantime, however, the Americans rule
in Monterey County. The new county-seat, Sa-
linas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain under the
Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American
character. The land is held, for the most part, in
those enormous tracts which are another legacy of
Mexican days, and form the present chief danger
and disgrace of California; and the holders are
mostly of American or British birth. We have
here in England no idea of the troubles and incon-
veniences which flow from the existence of these
large landholders — land-thieves, land-sharks, or
land-grabbers, they are more commonly and
plainly called. Thus the townlands of Monterey
are all in the hands of a single man. How they
came there is an obscure, vexatious question, and,
rightly or wrongly, the man is hated with a great
hatred. His life has been repeatedly in danger.

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 103

Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was
stopped and examined three evenings in succession
by disguised horsemen thirsting for his blood. A
certain house on the Salinas road, they say, he
always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the
squatter sent him warning long ago. But a year
since he was publicly pointed out for death by no
less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. Kearney is
a man too well known in California, but a word of
explanation is required for English readers. Origi-
nally an Irish drayman, he rose, by his command
of bad language, to almost dictatorial authority in
the State; throned it there for six months or so,
his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and conflagra-
tions; was first snuffed out last winter by Mr.
Coleman, backed by his San Francisco Vigilantes
and three gatling guns ; completed his own ruin
by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green-
backer party; and had at last to be rescued by his
old enemies, the police, out of the hands of his
rebellious followers. It was while he was at the
top of his fortune that Kearney visited Monterey
with his battle-cry against Chinese labour, the rail-

I04 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

road monopolists, and the land-thieves; and his
one articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to
" hang David Jacks.'' Had the town been Ameri-
can, in my private opinion, this would have been
done years ago. Land is a subject on which there
is no jesting in the West, and I have seen my friend
the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a com-
petition of titles with the face of a captain going
into battle and his Smith-and-Wesson convenient
to his hand.

On the ranche of another of these landholders
you may find our old friend, the truck system, in
full operation. Men live there, year in year out,
to cut timber for a nominal wage, wdiich is all con-
sumed in supplies. The longer they remain in this
desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt
— a burlesque injustice in a new country, where
labour should be precious, and one of those typical
instances which explains the prevailing discontent
and the success of the demagogue Kearney.

In a comparison between what was and what is
in California, the praisers of times past will fix
upon the Indians of Carmel. The valley drained

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 105

by the river so named is a true Calif ornian valley,
bare, clotted with chaparral, overlooked by quaint,
unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many pleas-
ant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by
wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards
a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined
mission on a hill. From the mission church the
eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is
filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers
on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has gone
b};, the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there
is no one left to care for the converted savage.
The church is roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes and
sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sun-
shine, daily widening the breaches and casting the
crockets from the wall. As an antiquity in this
new land, a quaint specimen of missionary archi-
tecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a
triple claim to preservation from all thinking
people ; but neglect and abuse have been its por-
tion. There is no sign of American interference,
save wdiere a headboard has been torn from a grave
to be a mark for pistol bullets. So it is with the

io6 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

Indians for whom it was erected. Their lands, I
was told, are being yearly encroached upon by the
neighbouring American proprietor, and with that
exception no man troubles his head for the Indians
of Carmel. Only one day in the year, the day
before our Guy Fawkes, the padre drives over the
hill from Monterey ; the little sacristy, which is the
only covered portion of the church, is filled with
seats and decorated for the service; the Indians
troop together, their bright dresses contrasting
with their dark and melancholy faces; and there,
among a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holi-
day-makers, you may hear God served with per-
haps more touching circumstances than in any
other temple under heaven. An Indian, stone-
blind and about eighty years of age, conducts the
singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet
they have the Gregorian music at their finger ends,
and pronounce the Latin so correctly that I could
follow the meaning as they sang. The pronunci-
ation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and
staccato. *' In saecula saeculo-ho-horum," they went,
w^ith a vigorous aspirate to every additional syl-

OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL 107

lable. I have never seen faces more vividly lit up
with joy than the faces of these Indian singers.
It was to them not only the worship of God, nor
an act by which they recalled and commemorated
better days, but was besides an exercise of culture,
where all they knew of art and letters was united
and expressed. And it made a man's heart sorry
for the good fathers of yore who had taught them
to dig and to reap, to read and to sing, who had
given them European mass-books which they still
preserve and study in their cottages, and who had
now passed away from all authority and influence
in that land — to be succeeded by greedy land-
thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a
thing may our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear
beside the doings of the Society of Jesus.

But revolution in this world succeeds to revo-
lution. All that I say in this paper is in a paulo-
past tense. The Monterey of last year exists no
longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert
by the railway. Three sets of diners sit down suc-
cessively to table. Invaluable toilettes figure along
the beach and between the live-oaks; and Mon-

io8 OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

terey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted
in the waiting-rooms at railway stations, as a
resort for wealth and fashion. Alas for the little
town ! it is not strong enough to resist the influ-
ence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor,
cjuaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey
must perish, like a lower race, before the million-

aire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.

[1880.]

FONTAINEBLEAU

VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS

I

THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing
apart. It is a place that people love even
more than they admire. The vigorous
forest air, the silence, the majestic avenues of high-
way, the wilderness of tumbled boulders, the great
age and dignity of certain groves — these are but
ingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre.
The place is sanative; the air, the light, the per-
fumes, and the shapes of things concord in happy
harmony. The artist may be idle and not fear the
'' blues." He may dally with his life. Mirth,
lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment
are of the very essence of the better kind of art;
and these, in that most smiling forest, he has the
chance to learn or to remember. Even on the plain
of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls

no FONTAINEBLEAU

upon the ear of fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven,
something ancient and healthy in the face of na-
ture, purify the niind alike from dulness and
hysteria. There is no place where the young are
more gladly conscious of their youth, or the old
better contented with their age.

The fact of its great and special beauty further
recommends this country to the artist. The field
was chosen by men in whose blood there still raced
some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great
art — Millet who loved dignity like Michelangelo,
Rousseau whose modern brush was dipped in the
p-lamour of the ancients. It was chosen before
the day of that strange turn in the history of art,
of which we now perceive the culmination in im-
pressionistic tales and pictures — that voluntary
aversion of the eye from all speciously strong and
beautiful effects — that disinterested love of dul-
ness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint
the river-side primrose. It was then chosen for its
proximity to Paris. And for the same cause, and
by the force of tradition, the painter of to-day
continues to inhabit and to paint it. There is in

FONTAINEBLEAU iii

France scenery incomparable for romance and
harmony. Provence, and the vahey of the Rhone
from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of
masterpieces waiting for the brush. The beauty is
not merely beauty; it tells, besides, a tale to the
imagination, and surprises while it charms. Here
you shall see castellated towns that would befit the
scenery of dreamland ; streets that glow with
colour like cathedral windows; hills of the most
exquisite proportions ; flowers of every precious
colour, growing thick like grass. All these, by the
grace of railway travel, are brought to the very
door of the modern painter; yet he does not seek
them ; he remains faithful to Fontainebleau, to
the eternal bridge of Gretz, to the watering-pot
cascade in Cernay valley. Even Fontainebleau
was chosen for him ; even in Fontainebleau he
shrinks from what is sharply charactered. But
one thing, at least, is certain, whatever he may
choose to paint and in whatever manner, it is good
for the artist to dwell among graceful shapes,
Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery, is classi-
cally graceful ; and though the student may look

112 FONTAI NEBLE AU

for different qualities, this quality, silently present,
Avill educate his hand and eye.

But, before all its other advantages — charm,
loveliness, or proximity to Paris — comes the
great fact that it is already colonised. The insti-
tution of a painters' colony is a work of time and
tact. The populatio!i must be conquered. The
inn-keeper has to be taught, and he soon learns, the
lesson of unlimited credit; he must be taught to
welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in
a very greasy coat, and with little baggage beyond
a box of colours and a canvas ; and he must learn
to preserve his faith in customers who will eat
heartily and drink of the best, borrow money to
buy tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a
year. A colour merchant has next to be attracted.
A certain vogue must be given to the place, lest the
painter, most gregarious of animals, should find
himself alone. And no sooner are these first diffi-
culties overcome, than fresh perils spring up upon
the other side; and the bourgeois and the tourist
are knocking at the gate. This is the crucial
moment for the colony. If these intruders gain a

FONTAI NEBLEAU 113

footing, they not only banish freedom and amen-
ity ; pretty soon, by means of their long purses,
they will have undone the education of the inn-
keeper ; prices will rise and credit shorten ; and
the poor painter must fare farther on and find
another hamlet. " Not here, O Apollo ! " will be-
come his song. Thus Trouville and, the other
day, St. Raphael were lost to the arts. Curious
and not always edifying are the shifts that the
French student uses to defend his lair; like the
cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters
of his chosen pool ; but at such a time and for so
practical a purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow him
license. Where his own purse and credit are not
threatened, he will do the honours of his village
generously. Any artist is made welcome, through
whatever medium he may seek expression ; science
is respected ; even the idler, if he prove, as he so
rarely does, a gentleman, will soon begin to find
himself at home. And when that essentially mod-
ern creature, the English or American girl-student,
began to walk calmly into his favourite inns as if

into a drawing-room at home, the French painter

8

114 FONTAINEBLE AU

owned himself defenceless; he submitted or he
fled. His French respectability, quite as precise
as ours, though covering different provinces of
life, recoiled aghast before the innovation. But
the girls were painters; there w^as nothing to be
done; and Barbizon, when I last saw it and for
the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair
invader. Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the
common tourist, the holiday shopman, and the
cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he hounded
from his villages with every circumstance of
contumely.

This purely artistic society is excellent for the
young artist. The lads are mostly fools ; they hold
the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness ; they are at
that stage of education, for the most part, when a
man is too much occupied with style to be aware
of the necessity for any matter; and this, above
all for the Englishman, is excellent. To work
grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment, to think
of his material and nothing else, is, for awhile at
least, the king's highway of progress. Here, in
England, too many painters and writers dwell

FONTAINEBLEAU 115

dispersed, unshielded, among the intelhgent bour-
geois. These, when they are not merely indiffer-
ent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral
influence of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For
art is, first of all and last of all, a trade. The love
of words and not a desire to publish new discov-
eries, the love of form and not a novel reading of
historical events, mark the vocation of the w^-iter
and the painter. The arabesque, properly speak-
ing, and even in literature, is the first fancy of the
artist; he first plays with his material as a child
plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a
second stage wdien he begins to use his pretty
counters for the end of representation. In that,
he must pause long and toil faithfully ; that is his
apprenticeship ; and it is only the few who will
really grow beyond it, and go forward, fully
equipped, to do the business of real art — to give
life to abstractions and significance and charm to
facts. In the meanwhile, let him dwell much
among his fellow-craftsmen. They alone can take
a serious interest in the childish tasks and pitiful
successes of these years. They alone can behold

ii6 FONTAI N EBLEAU

with equanimity this fingering of the dumb key-
board, this pohshing of empty sentences, this dull
and literal painting of dull and insignificant sub-
jects. Outsiders will spur him on. They will say,
*' Why do you not write a great book ? paint a
great picture?" If his guardian angel fail him,
they may even persuade him to the attempt, and,
ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his style
falsified for life.

And this brings me to a warning. The life of
the apprentice to any art is both unstrained and
pleasing; it is strewn with small successes in the
midst of a career of failure, patiently supported ;
the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain prog-
ress; and if he come not appreciably nearer to
the art of Shakespeare, grows letter-perfect in the
domain of A-B, ab. But the time comes when a
man should cease prelusory gymnastic, stand up,
put a violence upon his will, and for better or
worse, begin the business of creation. This evil
day there is a tendency continually to postpone:
above all with painters. They have made so many
studies that it has become a habit ; they make more,

FONTAI NEBLE AU 117

the walls of exhibitions blush with them; and
death finds these aged students still busy with their
horn-book. This class of man finds a congenial
home in artist villages ; in the slang of the Eng-
lish colony at Barbizon we used to call them
" Snoozers." Continual returns to the city, the
society of men farther advanced, the study of great
works, a sense of humour or, if such a thing is to
be had, a little religion or philosophy, are the
means of treatment. It will be time enough to
think of curing the malady after it has been
caught ; for to catch it is the very thing for which
you seek that dream-land of the painters' village.
" Snoozing " is a part of the artistic education ;
and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all
else being forgotten, as if they were an object in
themselves.

Lastly, there is something, or there seems to
be something, in the very air of France that com-
municates the love of style. Precision, clarity, the
cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace
in the handling, apart from any value in the
thought, seem to be acquired by the mere resi-

ii8 FONTAI NE BLEAU

dence; or if not acquired, become at least the more
appreciated. The air of Paris is ahve with this
technical inspiration. And to leave that airy city
and awake next day upon the borders of the
forest is but to change externals. The same spirit
of dexterity and finish breathes from the long
alleys and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses
that are still pretty in their confusion, and the
great plain that contrives to be decorative in its
emptiness.

II

In spite of its really considerable extent, the
forest of Fontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious.
I know the whole western side of it with what,
I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well enough
at least to testify that there is no square mile with-
out some special character and charm. Such
quarters, for instance, as the Long Rocher, the
Bas-Breau, and the Reine Blanche, might be a
hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point in
common beyond the silence of the birds. The two
last are really conterminous; and in both are tall

FO NTAI NEB LE AU 119

and ancient trees that have outHved a thousand
pohtical vicissitudes. But in the one the great oaks
prosper placidly upon an even floor; they be-
shadow a great field ; and the air and the light are
very free below their stretching boughs. In the
other the trees find difficult footing ; castles of white
rock lie tumbled one upon another, the foot slips,
the crooked viper slumbers, the moss clings in the
crevice; and above it all the great beech goes
spiring and casting forth her arms, and, with a
grace beyond church architecture, canopies this
rugged chaos. Meanwhile, dividing the two can-
tons, the broad white causeway of the Paris road
runs in an avenue : a road conceived for pageantry
and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an
army ; but, its days of glory over, it now lies
grilling in the sun between cool groves, and only
at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is
seen far away and faintly audible along its ample
sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a dis-
trict of sand and birch and boulder; a little upon
the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper
and heather; and close beyond that you may walk

I20 FONTAINEBLEAU

into a zone of pine-trees. So artfully are the in-
gredients mingled. Nor must it be forgotten that,
in all this part, you come continually forth upon
a hill-top, and behold the plain, northward and
westward, like an unrefulgent sea; nor that all
day long the shadows keep changing; and at last,
to the red fires of sunset, night succeeds, and with
the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and
fragrance. There are few things more renovating
than to leave Paris, the lamplit arches of the Car-
rousel, and the long alignment of the glittering
streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant
darkness of the wood.

In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly
alive. It is a changeful place to paint, a stirring
place to live in. As fast as your foot carries you,
you pass from scene to scene, each vigorously
painted in the colours of the sun, each endeared
by that hereditary spell of forests on the mind of
man who still remembers and salutes the ancient
refuge of his race.

And yet the forest has been civilised throughout.
The most savage corners bear a name, and have

FONTAINEBLEAU 121

been cherished hke antiquities; in the most remote,.
Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if
with conscious art ; and man, with his guiding
arrows of bhie paint, has countersigned the pic-
ture. After your farthest wandering, you are
never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue
of highway, to strike the centre point of branching
alleys, or to find the aqueduct trailing, thousand-
footed, through the brush. It is not a wilderness ;
it is rather a preserve. And, fitly enough, the
centre of the maze is not a hermit's cavern. In the
midst, a little mirthful town lies sunlit, humming
with the business of pleasure; and the palace,
breathing distinction and peopled by historic
names, stands smokeless among gardens.

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that
of the harmless humbug who called himself the
hermit. In a great tree, close by the high-road,
he had built himself a little cabin after the manner
of the Swiss Family Robinson ; thither he mounted
at night, by the romantic aid of a rope ladder ; and
if dirt be any proof of sincerity, the man was
savage as a Sioux. I had the pleasure of his ac-

122 FO NT A I NEB LE AU

quaintance; he appeared grossly stupid, not in his
perfect wits, and interested in nothing but small
change; for that he had a great avidity. In the
course of time he proved to be a chicken-stealer,
and vanished from his perch ; and perhaps from
the first he was no true votary of forest freedom,
but an ingenious, theatrically minded beggar, and
his cabin in the tree was only stock-in-trade to beg
withal. The choice of his position w^ould seem to
indicate so much ; for if in the forest there are no
places still to be discovered, there are many that
have been forgotten, and that lie unvisited. There,
to be sure, are the blue arrows waiting to reconduct
you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the
corner of a rock. But your security from interrup-
tion is complete; you might camp for weeks, if
there w^ere only water, and not a soul suspect your
presence; and if I may suppose the reader to have
committed some great crime and come to me for
aid, I think I could still find my w^ay to a small
cavern, fitted with a hearth and chimney, where he
might lie perfectly concealed. A confederate land-
scape-painter might daily supply him with food;

FONTAINEBLEAU 123

for water, he would have to make a nightly tramp
as far as to the nearest pond ; and at last, when the
hue and cry began to blow over, he might get
gently on the train at some side station, work
round by a series of junctions, and be quietly cap-
tured at the frontier.

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a
pleasure-ground, and although, in favourable
weather, and in the more celebrated quarters, it
literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of
the immunities and offe:-s some of the repose of
natural forests. And the solitary, although he
must return at night to his frequented inn, may
yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the com-
panionable silence of the trees. The demands of
the imagination vary ; some can be alone in a back
garden looked upon by windows ; others, like the
ostrich, are content with a solitude that meets
the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the
very borders of their desert, and are irritably con-
scious of a hunter's camp in an adjacent county.
To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem
but an extended tea-garden : a Rosherville on a

124 FONTAINEBLEAU

by-day. But to the plain man it offers solitude : an
excellent thing in itself, and a good whet for
company.

Ill

I WAS for some time a consistent Barbizonian;
et ego in Arcadia vixi, it was a pleasant season;
and that noiseless hamlet lying close among the bor-
ders of the wood is for me, as for so many others,
a green spot in memory. The great Millet was
just dead, the green shutters of his modest house
were closed ; his daughters were in mourning. The
date of my first visit was thus an epoch in the his-
tory of art : in a lesser way, it was an epoch in the
history of the Latin Quarter. The Petit Ccnacic
was dead and buried; Murger and his crew of
sponging vagabonds were all at rest from their
expedients; the tradition of their real life was
nearly lost; and the petrified legend of the Vie de
Bohemc had become a sort of gospel, and still gave
the cue to zealous imitators. But if the book be
written in rose-water, the imitation was still farther
expurgated ; honesty was the rule ; the inn-keepers

FONT AI N EBLEAU 125

gave, as T have said, almost unlimited credit ; they
suffered the seediest painter to depart, to take all
his belongings, and to leave his bill unpaid ; and
if they sometimes lost, it was by English and
Americans alone. At the same time, the great
influx of Anglo-Saxons had begun to affect the
life of the studious. There had been disputes ;
and, in one instance at least, the English and the
Americans had made common cause to prevent a
cruel pleasantry. It would be well if nations and
races could communicate their qualities ; but in
practice when they look upon each other, they have
an eye to nothing but defects. The Anglo-Saxon
is essentially dishonest; the French is devoid by
nature of the principle that we call " Fair Play.''
The Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his
guest, and, when that defender of innocence retired
over-seas and left his bills unpaid, he marvelled
once again; the good and evil were, in his eyes,
part and parcel of the same eccentricity; a shrug
expressed his judgment upon both.

At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in
the arts. Palizzi bore rule at Gretz — urbane,

126 FONTAINEBLEAU

superior rule — his memory rich in anecdotes of
the great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories ;
sceptical, composed, and venerable to the eye; and
yet beneath these outworks, all twittering with
Italian superstition, his eye scouting for omens,
and the whole fabric of his manners giving way on
the appearance of a hunchback. Cernay had
Pelouse, the admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingl}'-
critical of youth, who, when a full-blown com-
mercial traveller, suddenly threw down his sam-
ples, bought a colour-box, and became the master
whom we have all admired. Marlotte, for a cen-
tral figure, boasted Olivier de Penne. Only Bar-
bizon, since the death of Millet, was a headless
commonwealth. Even its secondary lights, and
those who in my day made the stranger welcom.e,
have since deserted it. The good Lachevre has
departed, carrying his household gods; and long
before that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from
our midst by an untimely death. He died before
he had deserved success ; it may be, he would never
have deserved it ; but his kind, comely, modest
countenance still haunts the memory of all who

FONTAINEBLEAU 127

knew him. Another — whom I will not name —
has moved farther on, pursuing the strange Odys-
sey of his decadence. His days of royal favour
had departed even then; but he still retained, in
his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain stamp of
conscious importance, hearty, friendly, filling the
room, the occupant of several chairs; nor had he
yet ceased his losing battle, still labouring upon
great canvases that none would buy, still waiting
the return of fortune. But these days also were
too good to last; and the former favourite of two
sovereigns fled, if I heard the truth, by night.
There was a time when he w^as counted a great
man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, how the
whirligig of time brings in his revenges ! To pity
Millet is a piece of arrogance; if life be hard for
such resolute and pious spirits, it is harder still
for us, had we the wit to understand it; but we
may pity his unhappier rival, who, for no apparent
merit, was raised to opulence and momentary fame,
and, through no apparent fault, was suffered step
by step to sink again to nothing. No misfortune
can exceed the bitterness of such back-foremost

128 FO NTAI NEBLE AU

progress, even bravely supported as it was ; but to
those also who were taken early from the easel, a
regret is due. From all the young men of this
period, one stood out by the vigour of his promise ;
he was in the age of fermentation, enamoured of
eccentricities. " II faut faire de la peinture nou-
velle," was his watchword; but if time and expe-
rience had continued his education, if he had been
eranted health to return from these excursions
to the steady and the central, I must believe that
the name of Hills had become famous.

Siron's inn, that excellent artists' barrack, was
managed upon easy principles. At any hour of the
night, when you returned from wandering in the
forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped
yourself to liquors, or descended to the cellar and
returned laden with beer or wine. The Sirons
were all locked in slumber; there was none to
check your inroads ; only at the week's end a com-
putation was made, the gross sum was divided,
and a varying share set down to every lodger's
name under the rubric : estrats. Upon the more
long-suffering the larger tax was levied ; and your

FO N TAI NEB LE AU 129

bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness
of your disposition. At any hour of the morning,
again, you could get your coffee or cold milk, and
set forth into the forest. The doves had perhaps
wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and
on the threshold of the inn you were met by the
aroma of the forest. Close by w^ere the great aisles,
the mossy boulders, the interminable field of forest
shadow. There you were free to dream and wan-
der. And at noon, and again at six o'clock, a good
meal awaited you on Siron's table. The whole of
your accommodation, set aside that varying item
of the cstrats, cost you five francs a day ; your bill
was never offered you until you asked it ; and if
you were out of luck's way, you might depart for
where you pleased and leave it pending.

IV

Theoretically, the house w^as open to all
comers ; practically, it was a kind of club. The
guests protected themselves, and, in so doing, they
protected Siron. Formal manners being laid aside,
essential courtesy was the more rigidly exacted;

ijo FONTAINEBLEAU

the new arrival had to feel the pulse of the so-
ciety; and a breach of its undefined observances
was promptly punished. A man might be as plain,
as dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he desired ;
but to a touch of presumption or a word of hector-
ing these free Barbizonians were as sensitive as
a tea-party of maiden ladies. I have seen people
driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult
to say in words what they had done, but they de-
served their fate. They had shown themselves
unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms ; they
had pushed themselves ; they had '' made their
head " ; they wanted tact to appreciate the " fine
shades " of Barbizonian etiquette. And once they
were condemned, the process of extrusion was
ruthless in its cruelty ; after one evening with the
formidable Bodmer, the Baily of our common-
wealth, the erring stranger was beheld no more;
he rose exceeding early the next day, and the first
coach conveyed him from the scene of his discom-
fiture. These sentences of banishment were never,
in my knowledge, delivered against an artist ; such
would, I believe, have been illegal ; but the odd and

FONTAIN EB LEAU 131

pleasant fact is this, that they were never needed.
Painters, sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen
all of these in Barbizon ; and some were sulky, and
some blatant and inane; but one and all entered
at once into the spirit of the association. This
singular society is purely French, a creature of
French virtues, and possibly of French defects. It
cannot be imitated by the English. The rough-
ness, the impatience, the more obvious selfishness,
and even the more ardent friendships of the Anglo-
Saxon, speedily dismember such a commonwealth.
But this random gathering of young French
painters, with neither apparatus nor parade of
government, yet kept the life of the place upon
a certain footing, insensibly imposed their etiquette
upon the docile, and by caustic speech enforced
their edicts against the unwelcome. To think of it
is to wonder the more at the strange failure of their
race upon the larger theatre. This inbred civility
— to use the word in its completest meaning — this
natural and facile adjustment of contending liber-
ties, seems all that is required to make a governable
nation and a just and prosperous country.

132 FONTAINEBLEAU

Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full
of high spirits, of laughter, and of the initiative
of youth. The few elder men who joined us were
still young at heart, and took the key from their
companions. We returned from long stations in
the fortifying air, our blood renewed by the sun-
shine, our spirits refreshed by the silence of the
forest ; the Babel of loud voices sounded good ;
we fell to eat and play like the natural man ; and
in the high inn chamber, panelled with indifferent
pictures and lit by candles guttering in the night
air, the talk and laughter sounded far into the
night. It was a good place and a good life for any
naturally minded youth ; better yet for the student
of painting, and perhaps best of all for the student
of letters. He, too, w^as saturated in this atmos-
phere of style; he w^as shut out from the disturb-
ing currents of the world, he might forget that
there existed other and more pressing interests
than that of art. But, in such a place, it was hardly
possible to write ; he could not drug his conscience,
like the painter, by the production of listless
studies; he saw himself idle among many who

FONTAINEBLEAU 133

were apparently, and some who were really, em-
ployed; and what with the impulse of increasing
health and the continual provocation of romantic
scenes, he became tormented with the desire to
w^ork. He enjoyed a strenuous idleness full of
visions, hearty meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth
among companions; and still floating like music
through his brain, foresights of great works that
Shakespeare might be proud to have conceived,
headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas, and
words that were alive with import. So in youth,
like Moses from the mountain, we have sights of
that House Beautiful of art which we shall never
enter. They are dreams and unsubstantial ; visions
of style that repose upon no base of human mean-
ing; the last heart-throbs of that excited amateur
who has to die in all of us before the artist can be
born. But they come to us in such a rainbow of
glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull
and earthly in comparison. We were all artists ;
almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an
imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of
some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if

134 FONTAINEBLEAU

we were happy! But art, of whatever nature, is
a kind mistress ; and though these dreams of youth
fall by their own baselessness, others succeed,
graver and more substantial ; the symptoms
change, the amiable malady endures ; and still, at
an equal distance, the House Beautiful shines upon
its hill-top.

Gretz lies out of the forest, down by the bright
river. It boasts a mill, an ancient church, a castle,
and a bridge of many sterlings. And the bridge
is a piece of public property; anonymously fa-
mous ; beaming on the incurious dilettante from
the walls of a hundred exhibitions. I have seen
it in the Salon ; I have seen it in the Academy ;
I have seen it in the last French Exposition,
excellently done by Bloomer; in a black-and-
white, by Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this
essay in the pages of the Magazine of Art.
Long-suffering bridge! And if you visit Gretz
to-morrow, you shall find another generation,
camped at the bottom of Chevillon's garden

FONTAINEBLEAU 135

under their white umbrellas, and doggedly paint-
ing it again.

The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less
inspiring place than Barbizon. I give it the
palm over Cernay. There is something ghastly
in the great empty village square of Cernay, with
the inn tables standing in one corner, as though
the stage wxre set for rustic opera, and in the early
morning all the painters breaking their fast upon
white wine under the windows of the villagers.
It is vastly different to awake in Gretz, to go down
the green inn-garden, to find the river streaming
through the bridge, and to see the dawn begin
across the poplared level. The meals are laid in
the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves. The
splash of oars and bathers, the bathing costumes
out to dry, the trim canoes beside the jetty, tell of
a society that has an eye to pleasure. There is
'' something to do " at Gretz. Perhaps, for that
very reason, I can recall no such enduring ardours,
no such glories of exhilaration, as among the
solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon.
This " something to do " is a great enemy to joy ;

136 FONTAINEBLEAU

it is a way out of it; you wreak your high spirits
on some cut-and-dry employment, and behold them
gone ! But Gretz is a merry place after its kind :
pretty to see, merry to inhabit. The course of its
pellucid river, whether up or down, is full of gentle
attractions for the navigator : islanded reed-mazes
where, in autumn, the red berries cluster ; the mir-
rored and inverted images of trees ; lilies, and
mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs. And
of all noble sweeps of roadway, none is nobler,
on a windy dusk, than the highroad to Nemours
between its lines of talking poplar.

But even Gretz is changed. The old inn, long
shored and trussed and buttressed, fell at length
under the mere weight of years, and the place as
it was is but a fading image in the memory of
former guests. They, indeed, recall the ancient
wooden stair ; they recall the rainy evening, the
wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and the com-
pany that gathered round the pillar in the kitchen.
But the material fabric is now dust ; soon, with
the last of its inhabitants, its very memory shall
follow; and they, in their turn, shall suffer the

FONTAINEBLEAU 137

same law, and, both in name and lineament, vanish
from the world of men. " For remembrance of the
old house' sake," as Pepys once quaintly put it, let
me tell one story. When the tide of invasion
swept over France, two foreign painters were left
stranded and penniless in Gretz ; and there, until
the war was over, the Chevillons ungrudgingly
harboured them. It was difficult to obtain sup-
plies; but the two waifs were still welcome to the
best, sat down daily with the family to table, and
at the due intervals were supplied with clean nap-
kins, which they scrupled to employ. Madame
Chevillon observed the fact and reprimanded them.
But they stood firm ; eat they must, but having
no money they would soil no napkins.

VI

Nemours and' Moret, for all they are so pictur-
esque, have been little visited by painters. They
are, indeed, too populous ; they have manners of
their own, and might resist the drastic process of
colonisation. Montigny has been somewhat
strangely neglected ; I never knew it inhabited

ijS F O N T A I N E B L E A U

but once, when Will H. Low installed himself there
with a barrel of piqiiettc, and entertained his
friends in a leafy trellis above the weir, in sight of
the green country and to the music of the falling
water. It was a most airy, quaint, and pleasant
place of residence, just too rustic to be stagey;
and from my memories of the place in general, and
that garden trellis in particular — at morning,
visited by birds, or at night, when the dew fell
and the stars were of the party — I am inclined
to think perhaps too favourably of the future
of Montigny. Chailly-en-Biere has outlived all
things, and lies dustily slumbering in the plain —
the cemetery of itself. The great road remains
to testify of its former bustle of postilions and
carriage bells ; and, like memorial tablets, there
still hang in the inn room the paintings of a former
generation, dead or decorated long ago. In my
time, one man only, greatly daring, dwelt there.
From time to time he would walk over to Barbizon,
like a shade revisiting the glimpses of the moon,
and after some communication with flesh and
blood return to his austere hermitage. But even

FONTAINEBLEAU 139

he, when I last revisited the forest, had come to
Barbizon for good, and closed the roll of Chailly-
ites. It may revive — but I much doubt it.
Acheres and Recloses still wait a pioneer ; Bourron
is out of the question, being merely Gretz over
again, without the river, the bridge, or the beauty ;
and of all the possible places on the western side,
Marlotte alone remains to be discussed. I scarcely
know Marlotte, and, very likely for that reason,
am not much in love with it. It seems a glaring
and unsightly hamlet. The inn of Mother Antonie
is unattractive; and its more reputable rival,
though comfortable enough, is commonplace. Mar-
lotte has a name ; it is famous ; if I were the young
painter I would leave it alone in its glory.

VII

These are the words of an old stager; and
though time is a good conservative in forest places,
much may be untrue to-day. Many of us have
passed Arcadian days there and moved on, but yet
left a portion of our souls behind us buried in the
woods. I would not dig for these reliquiae; they

HO FONTAINEBLEAU

are incommunicable treasures that will not enrich
the finder; and yet there may lie, interred below
great oaks or scattered along forest paths, stores of
youth's dynamite and dear remembrances. And
as one generation passes on and renovates the field
of tillage for the next, I entertain a fancy that
when the young men of to-day go forth into the
forest, they shall find the air still vitalised by the
spirits of their predecessors, and, like those " un-
heard melodies " that are the sweetest of all, the
memory of our laughter shall still haunt the field
of trees. Those merry voices that in woods call the
wanderer farther, those thrilling silences and whis-
pers of the groves, surely in Fontainebleau they
must be vocal of me and my companions ? We are
not content to pass away entirely from the scenes
of our delight; we would leave, if but in grati-
tude, a pillar and a legend.

One generation after another fall like honey-
bees upon this memorable forest, rifle its sweets,
pack themselves with vital memories, and when
the theft is consummated depart again into life
richer, but poorer also. The forest, indeed, they

FONTAINEBLEAU 141

have possessed, .from that day forward it is theirs
indissolubly, and they will return to walk in it at
night in the fondest of their dreams, and use it
for ever in their books and pictures. Yet when
they made their packets, and put up their notes
and sketches, something, it should seem, had been
forgotten. A projection of themselves shall appear
to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness, a
natural child of fancy, begotten and forgotten un-
awares. Over the whole field of our wanderings
such fetches are still travelling like indefatigable
bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all
beloved spots, are very long of life, and memory
is piously unwilling to forget their orphanage. If
anywhere about that wood you meet my airy
bantling, greet him with tenderness. He was a
pleasant lad, though now abandoned. And when
it comes to your own turn to quit the forest may
you leave behind you such another; no Antony or
Werther, let us hope, no tearful whipster, but, as
becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in
which we figure, the child of happy hours.

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not

142 F O N T A 1 N E B L E A U

many noble, that has not been .mirthfully con-
ceived. And no man, it may be added, was ever
anything but a wet blanket and a cross to his com-
panions who boasted not a copious spirit of enjoy-
ment. Whether as man or artist, let the youth
make haste to Fontainebleau, and once there let
him address himself to the spirit of the place; he
will learn more from exercise than from studies,
although both are necessary; and if he can get
into his heart the gaiety and inspiration of the
woods he w^ill have gone far to undo the evil of
his sketches. A spirit once well strung up to the
concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will
hardly dare to finish a study and magniloquently
ticket it a pictvu-e. The incommunicable thrill of
things, that is the tuning-fork by which we test the
flatness of our art. Here it is that Nature teaches
and condemns, and still spurs up to further effort
and new failure. Thus it is that she sets us blush-
ing at our ignorant and tepid works ; and the more
we find of these inspiring shocks the less shall we
be apt to love the literal in our productions. In all
sciences and senses the letter kills; and to-day,

FONTAINEBLEAU 143

when cackling human geese express their igno-
rant condemnation of all studio pictures, it is a
lesson most useful to be learnt. Let the young
painter go to Fontainebleau, and while he stupefies
himself with studies that teach him the mechan-
ical side of his trade, let him walk in the great air,
and be a servant of mirth, and not pick and bot-
anise, but wait upon the moods of nature. So he
will learn — or learn not to forget — the poetry/
of life and earth, which, when he has acquired his
track, will save him from joyless reproduction.

[1882.]

RANDOM MEMORIES

I. THE COAST OF FIFE

MANY writers have vigorously described
the pains of the first day or the first
night at school ; to a boy of any enter-
prise, I believe, they are more often agreeably
exciting. Misery — or at least misery unrelieved
— is confined to another period, to the days of sus-
pense and the " dreadful looking-for " of depart-
ure; when the old life is running to an end, and
the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun;
and to the pain of an imminent parting, there is
added the unrest of a state of conscious pre-exist-
ence. The area-railings, the beloved shop-window,
the smell of semi-suburban tanpits, the song of the
church-bells upon a Sunday, the thin, high voices
of compatriot children in a playing-field — what
a sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes
to him from each familiar circumstance! The

RANDOM MEMORIES 145

assaults of sorrow come not from within, as it
seems to him, but from without. I was proud
and glad to go to school; had I been let alone, I
could have borne up like any hero; but there was
around me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of
lamentation : " Poor little boy, he is going away

— unkind little boy, he is going to leave us " ; so
the unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with
yearning and reproach. And at length, one mel-
ancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a
place where it seems to me, looking back, it must
be always autumn and generally Sunday, there
came suddenly upon the face of all I saw — the
long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the
church upon the hill, the woody hillside garden

— a look of such a piercing sadness that my
heart died ; and seating myself on a door-step,
I shed tears of miserable sympathy. A benevo-
lent cat cumbered me the while with consola-
tions — we two were alone in all that was visible
of the London Road: two poor waifs who had
each tasted sorrow — and she fawned upon the
weeper, and gambolled for his entertainment,

10

146 RANDOM MEMORIES

watching the effect, it seemed, with motherly
eyes.

For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I con-
fessed at home the story of my weakness; and
so it comes about that I owed a certain journey,
and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in
the London Road. It was judged, if I had thus
brimmed over on the public highway, some change
of scene was (in the medical sense) indicated; my
father at the time was visiting the harbour lights
of Scotland; and it was decided he should take
me along with him around a portion of the shores
of Fife; my first professional tour, my first jour-
ney in the complete character of man, without the
help of petticoats.

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province)
may be observed by the curious on the map, occu-
pying a tongue of land between the firths of Forth
and Tay. It may be continually seen from many
parts of Edinburgh (among the rest, from the
windows of my father's house) dying away into
the distance and the easterly Jiaar with one smoky
sea-side town beyond another, or in winter printing

RANDOM MEMORIES 147

on the grey heaven some gHttering hill-tops. It
has no beauty to recommend it, being a low, sea-
salted, wind-vexed promontory; trees very rare,
except (as common on the east coast) along the
dens of rivers; the fields well cultivated, I under-
stand, but not lovely to the eye. It is of the coast
I speak : the interior may be the garden of Eden.
History broods over that part of the world like
the easterly haar. Even on the map, its long row
of Gaelic place-names bear testimony to an old
and settled race. Of these little towns, posted
along the shore as close as sedges, each with its bit
of harbour, its old weather-beaten church or public
building, its flavour of decayed prosperity and de-
caying fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or
tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the
king may be still observed (in the ballad) drink-
ing the blood-red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing,
once the quarantine of Leith ; Aberdour, hard by
the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle
where the " bonny face was spoiled " ; Burntisland,
where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the
Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between

148 RANDOM MEMORIES

tide-marks, and publicly prayed against the rover
at the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland
dialect ; Kinghorn, where Alexander " brak 's
neckbane " and left Scotland to the English wars ;
Kirkcaldy, where the witches once prevailed ex-
tremely and sank tall snips and honest mariners
in the North Sea ; Dysart, famous — well famous
at least to me for the Dutch ships that lay in its
harbour, painted like toys and with pots of flowers
and cages of song-birds in the cabin windows, and
for one particular Dutch skipper who would sit
all day in slippers on the break of the poop, smok-
ing a long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounce
AVeems) with its bat-haunted caves, where the
Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden,
passed a night of superstitious terrors; Leven,
a bald, quite modern place, sacred to summer
visitors, whence there has gone but yesterday the
tall figure and the white locks of the last English-
man in Delhi, my uncle Dr. Balfour, who was still
walking his hospital rounds, while the troopers
from Meerut clattered and cried " Deen, Deen "
along the streets of the imperial city, and Wil-

RANDOM MEMORIES 149

longhby mustered his handful of heroes at the
magazine, and the nameless brave one in the tele-
graph office was perhaps already fingering his last
despatch; and just a little beyond Leven, Largo
Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about
its feet, the town of Alexander Selkirk, better
known under the name of Robinson Crusoe. So
on, the list might be pursued (only for private
reasons, which the reader will shortly have an
opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and Pitten-
weem, and the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke,
and Crail, where Primate Sharpe was once a
humble and innocent country minister : on to the
heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea-
w^ood of matted elders and the quaint old mansion
of Balcomie, itself overlooking but the breach or
the quiescence of the deep — the Carr Rock beacon
rising close in front, and as night draws in, the star
of the Inchcape reef springing up on the one hand,
and the star of the A'lay Island on the o^her, and
farther off yet a third and a greater on the craggy
foreland of St. Abb's. And but a little way round
the corner of the land, imminent itself above the

150 RANDOM MEMORIES

sea, stands the gem of the province and the Hght
of mediaeval Scotland, St. Andrews, where the
great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the
world, and the second of the name and title per-
ished (as you may read in Knox's jeering narra-
tive) under the knives of true-blue Protestants,
and to this day (after so many centuries) the
current voice of the professor is not hushed.

Here it was that my first tour of inspection
began, early on a bleak easterly morning. There
Avas a crashing run of sea upon the shore, I rec-
ollect, and my father and the man of the harbour
light must sometimes raise their voices to be
audible. Perhaps it is from this circumstance,
that I always imagine St. Andrews to be an in-
effectual seat of learning, and the sound of the
east wind and the bursting surf to linger in its
drowsy class-rooms and confound the utterance
of the professor, until teacher and taught are alike
drowned in oblivion, and only the sea-gull beats
on the windows and the draught of the sea-air
rustles in the pages of the open lecture. But
upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrews in

RANDOM MEMORIES 151

general, the reader must consult the works of Mr.
Andrew Lang ; who has written of it but the other
day in his dainty prose and with his incommuni-
cable humour, and long ago in one of his best
poems, with grace, and local truth and a note of
unaffected pathos. Mr. Lang knows all about the
romance, I say, and the educational advantages,
but I doubt if he had turned his attention to the
harbour lights ; and it may be news even to him,
that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable.
Hanging about with the east wind humming in
my teeth, and my hands (I make no doubt) in
my pockets, I looked for the first time upon that
tragi-comedy of the visiting engineer which I have
seen so often re-enacted on a more important stage.
Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing:
'' It is the most painful thing that can occur to
me to have a correspondence of this kind with any
of the keepers, and when I come to the Light
House, instead of having the satisfaction to meet
them with approbation and welcome their Family,
it is distressing when one is obliged to put on a
most angry countenance and demeanour." This

1^2 RANDOM MEMORIES

painful obligation has been hereditary in my race.
I have myself, on a perfectly amateur and unau-
thorised inspection of Turnberry Point, bent my
brows upon the keeper on the question of storm-
panes ; and felt a keen pang of self-reproach, when
we went down-stairs again and I found he was
making a coffin for his infant child ; and then
regained my equanimity with the thought that I
had done the man a service, and when the proper
inspector came, he would be readier with his panes.
The human race is perhaps credited with more
duplicity than it deserves. The visitation of a
lighthouse at least is a business of the most trans-
parent nature. As soon as the boat grates on the
shore, and the keepers step forward in their uni-
formed coats, the very slouch of the fellows' shoul-
ders tells their story, and the engineer may begin
at once to assume his " angry countenance." Cer-
tainly the brass of the handrail will be clouded ;
and if the brass be not immaculate, certainly all
will be to match — the reflectors scratched, the
spare lamp unready, the storm-panes in the store-
house. If a light is not rather more than middling

RANDOM MEMORIES 153

good, it will be radically bad. Mediocrity (except
in literature) appears to be unattainable by man.
But of course the unfortunate of St. Andrews was
only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had
no uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by
his trade and stood (in the mediaeval phrase) quite
out of the danger of my father; but he had a
painful interview for all that, and perspired
extremely.

From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir.
My father had announced we were " to post," and
the phrase called up in my hopeful mind visions
of top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson's
Dance of Death; but it was only a jingling cab that
came to the inn door, such as I had driven in a
thousand times at the low price of one shilling on
the streets of Edinburgh. Beyond this disap-
pointment, I remember nothing of that drive. It
is a road I have often travelled, and of not one
of these journeys do I remember any single trait.
The fact has not been suffered to encroach on the
truth of the imagination. I still see A^Tagus Muir
two hundred years ago; a desert place, quite

154 RANDOM MEMORIES

uninclosed; in the midst, the primate's carriage
fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in
pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the
first. No scene of history has ever written itself
so deeply on my mind ; not because Balfour, that
questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of
my own ; not because of the pleadings of the vic-
tim and his daughter; not even because of the
live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpens 'bacco-box,
thus clearly indicating his complicity with Satan ;
nor merely because, as it was after all a crime
of a fine religious flavour, it figured in Sunday
books and afforded a grateful relief from Minis-
tering Children or the Memoirs of Mrs. Katharine
Winslowe. The figure that always fixed my atten-
tion is that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the
saddle with his cloak about his mouth, and through
all that long, bungling, vociferous hurly-burly,
revolving privately a case of conscience. He would
take no hand in tlie deed, because he had a private
spite against the victim, and " that action " must
be sullied with no suggestion of a worldly motive;
on the other hand, " that action," in itself was

RANDOM MEMORIES 155

highly justified, he had cast in his lot with " the
actors," and he must stay there, inactive but
publicly sharing the responsibility. " You are
a gentleman — you will protect me!" cried the
wounded old man, crawling towards him. " I
w^ill never lay a hand on you," said Hackston,
and put his cloak about his mouth. It is an old
temptation with me, to pluck away that cloak and
see the face — to open that bosom and to read
the heart. With incomplete romances about Hack-
ston, the drawers of my youth were lumbered. I
read him up in every printed book that I could lay
my hands on. I even dug among the Wodrow
manuscripts, sitting shamefaced in the very room
where my hero had been tortured two centuries
before, and keenly conscious of my youth in the
midst of other and (as I fondly thought) more
gifted students. All was vain : that he had passed
a riotous nonage, that he was a zealot, that he
twice displayed (compared wath his grotesque
companions) some tincture of soldierly resolution
and even of military common-sense, and that he
figured memorably in the scene on Magus Muir,

156 RANDOM MEMORIES

so much and no more could I make out. But
whenever I cast my eyes backward, it is to see him
hke a landmark on the plains of history, sitting
with his cloak about his mouth, inscrutable. How
small a thing creates an immortality ! I do not
think he can have been a man entirely common-
place; but had he not thrown his cloak about his
mouth, or had the witnesses forgot to chronicle
the action, he would not thus have haunted the
imagination of my boyhood, and to-day he would
scarce delay me for a paragraph. An incident, at
once romantic and dramatic, which at once awakes
the judgment and makes a picture for the eye,
how little do we realise its perdurable power!
Perhaps no one does so but the author, just as none
but he appreciates the influence of jingling words;
so that he looks on upon life, with something of
a covert smile, seeing people led by what they
fancy to be thoughts and what are really the accus-
tomed artifices of his own trade, or roused by what
they take to be principles and are really picturesque
effects. In a pleasant book about a school-class
club. Colonel Fergusson has recently told a little

RANDOM MEMORIES 157

anecdote. A '' Philosophical Society " was formed
by some Academy boys — among them. Colonel
Fergnsson himself, Fleeming Jenkin, and Andrew
Wilson, the Christian Buddhist and author of The
Abode of Snozu. Before these learned pundits,
one member laid the following ingenious prob-
lem : " What would be the result of putting a
pound of potassium in a pot of porter?" ''I
should think there would be a number of inter-
esting bi-products," said a smatterer at my elbow ;
but for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and
stands as a type of much that is most human. For
this inquirer who conceived himself to burn with
a zeal entirely chemical, was really immersed in a
design of a quite different nature ; unconsciously
to his own recently breeched intelligence, he was
engaged in literature. Putting, pound, potassium,
pot, porter ; initial p, mediant t — that was his
idea, poor little boy! So with politics and that
which excites men in the present, so with history
and that which rouses them in the past : there lie
at the root of what appears, most serious unsus-
pected elements. The triple town of Anstruther

158 RANDOM MEMORIES

Wester, Anstruther Easter, and Cellardyke, all
three Royal Burghs — or two Royal Burghs and
a less distinguished suburb, I forget which — lies
continuously along the sea-side, and boasts of
either two or three separate parish churches, and
either two or three separate harbours. These
ambiguities are painful; but the fact is (although
it argue me uncultured), I am but poorly posted
upon Cellardyke. My business lay in the two
Anstruthers. A tricklet of a stream divides them,
spanned by a bridge ; and over the bridge at the
time of my knowledge, the celebrated Shell House
stood outpost on the west. This had been the
residence of an agreeable eccentric; during his
fond tenancy, he had illustrated the outer w^alls,
as high (if I remember rightly) as the roof, with
elaborate patterns and pictures, and snatches of
verse in the vein of exegi monumentuni ; shells
and pebbles, artfully contrasted and conjoined,
had been his medium; and I like to think of him
standing back upon the bridge, when all was
finished, drinking in the general effect and (like
Gibbon) already lamenting his employment.

RANDOM MEMORIES 159

The same bridge saw another sight in the seven-
teenth century. Mr. Thomson, the '' curat " of
Anstruther Easter, was a man highly obnoxious
to the devout : in the first place, because he was
a '' curat " ; in the second place, because he was a
person of irregular and scandalous life; and in
the third place, because he was generally suspected
of dealings w^ith the Enemy of Man. These three
disqualifications, in the popular literature of the
time, go hand in hand; but the end of Mr. Thom-
son was a thing quite by itself, and in the proper
phrase, a manifest judgment. He had been at
a friend's house in Anstruther Wester, where (and
elsewhere, I suspect,) he had partaken of the
bottle ; indeed, to put the thing in our cold modern
way, the reverend gentleman was on the brink of
delirium tremens. It was a dark night, it seems ;
a little lassie came carrying a lantern to fetch the
curate home ; and away they went down the street
of Anstruther Wester, the lantern swinging a bit
in the child's hand, the barred lustre tossing up
and down along the front of slumbering houses,
and Mr. Thomson not altogether steady on his

i6o RANDOM MEMORIES

legs nor (to all appearance) easy in his mind. The
pair had reached the middle of the bridge when
(as I conceive the scene) the poor tippler started
in some baseless fear and looked behind him ; the
child, already shaken by the minister's strange
behaviour, started also ; in so doing, she would
jerk the lantern ; and for the space of a moment
the lights and the shadows would be all con-
founded. Then it was that to the unhinged toper
and the twittering child, a huge bulk of blackness
seemed to sweep down, to pass them close by as
they stood upon the bridge, and to vanish on the
farther side in the general darkness of the night.
'' Plainly the devil came for Mr. Thomson ! "
thought the child. What Mr. Thomson thought
himself, we have no ground of knowledge ; but
he fell upon his knees in the midst of the bridge
like a man praying. On the rest of the journey
to the manse, history is silent ; but when they
came to the door, the poor caitiff, taking the lan-
tern from the child, looked upon her with so lost
a countenance that her little courage died within
her, and she fled home screaming to her parents.

RANDOM MEMORIES i6i

Not a soul would venture out; all that night, the
minister dwelt alone with his terrors in the manse;
and when the day dawned, and men made bold to
go about the streets, they found the devil had come,
indeed' for Mr. Thomson.

This manse of Anstruther Easter has another
and a more cheerful association. It was early in
the morning, about a century before the days of
Mr. Thomson, that his predecessor was called out
of bed to welcome a Grandee of Spain, the Duke
of Medina Sidonia, just landed in the harbour
underneath. But sure there was never seen a
more decayed grandee; sure there was never a
duke welcomed from a stranger place of exile.
Half-way between Orkney and Shetland, there
lies a certain isle; on the one hand the Atlantic,
on the other the North Sea, bombard its pillared
cliffs; sore-eyed, short-living, inbred fishers and
their families herd in its few huts; in the grave-
yard pieces of wreck-wood stand for monuments;
there is nowhere a more inhospitable spot. Belle-
Isle-en-Mer — Fair-Isle-at-Sea — that is a name

that has always rung in my mind's ear like music;

II

i62 RANDOM MEMORIES

but the only ** Fair Isle " on which I ever set my
foot, was this unhomely, rugged turret-top of sub-
marine sierras. Here, when his ship was broken,
my lord Duke joyfully got ashore; here for long
months he and certain of his men were harboured ;
and it was from this durance that he landed at last
to be welcomed (as well as such a papist deserved,
no doubt) by the godly incumbent of Anstruther
Easter; and after the Fair Isle, what a fine city
must that have appeared ! and after the island diet,
what a hospitable spot the minister's table! And
yet he must have lived on friendly terms with his
outlandish hosts. For to this day there still sur-
vives a relic of the long winter evenings when the
sailors of the great Armada crouched about the
hearths of the Fair-Islanders, the planks of their
own lost galleon perhaps lighting up the scene, and
the gale and the surf that beat about the coast con-
tributing their melancholy voices. All the folk
of the north isles are great artificers of knitting:
the Fair-Islanders alone dye their fabrics in the
Spanish manner. To this day, gloves and night-
caps, innocently decorated, may be seen for sale

RANDOM MEMORIES 163

in the Shetland warehouse at Edinburgh, or on
the Fair Isle itself in the catechist's house; and to
this day, they tell the story of the Duke of Medina
Sidonia's adventure.

It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some at-
traction for " persons of quality." When I landed
there myself, an elderly gentleman, unshaved,
poorly attired, his shoulders wrapped in a plaid,
was seen walking to and fro, with a book in his
hand, upon the beach. He paid no heed to our
arrival, which we thought a strange thing in itself;
but when one of the officers of the Pharos, passing
narrowly by him, observed his book to be a Greek
Testament, our wonder and interest took a higher
flight. The catechist was cross-examined ; he said
the gentleman had been put across some time be-
fore in Mr. Bruce of Sumburgh's schooner, the
only link between the Fair Isle and the rest of the
world; and that he held services and was doing
" good." So much came glibly enough; but when
pressed a little farther, the catechist displayed em-
barrassment. A singular diffidence appeared upon
his- face: " They tell me," said he, in low tones,

i64 RANDOM MEMORIES

** that he's a lord." And a lord he was; a peer
of the realm pacing that inhospitable beach with
his Greek Testament, and his plaid about his
shoulders, set upon doing good, as he understood
it, worthy man ! And his grandson, a good-
looking little boy, much better dressed than the
lordly evangelist, and speaking with a silken Eng-
lish accent very foreign to the scene, accompanied
me for awhile in my exploration of the island.
I suppose this little fellow is now my lord, and
wonder how much he remembers of the Fair Isle.
Perhaps not much; for he seemed to accept very
quietly his savage situation ; and under such guid-
ance, it is like that this was not his first nor yet
his last adventure.

RANDOM MEMORIES

(^continued)

II. THE EDUCATION OF AN ENGINEER

Jl NSTRUTHER is a place sacred to the
/^% Muse; she inspired (really to a consider-
able extent) Tennant's vernacular poem
Anst'er Fair; and I have there waited upon her
myself with much devotion. This was when I
came as a young man to glean engineering expe-
rience from the building of the breakwater. What
I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but indeed
I had already my own private determination to be
an author; I loved the art of words and the
appearances of life; and travellers, and headers,
and rubble^ and polished ashlar, and pierres per-
dues, and even the thrilling question of the string-
course, interested me only (if they interested me at
all) as properties for some possible romance or as
words to add to my vocabulary. To grow a little

i66 RANDOM MEMORJES

catholic is the compensation of years; youth is
one-eyed ; and in those days, though I haunted the
breakwater by day, and even loved the place for the
sake of the sunshine, the thrilling sea-side air,
the wash of waves on the sea-face, the green glim-
mer of the divers' helmets far below, and the
musical chinking of the masons, my one genuine
preoccupation lay elsewhere, and my only industry
w^as in the hours when I was not on duty. I lodged
with a certain Bailie Brown, a carpenter by trade;
and there, as soon as dinner was despatched, in a
chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, drew in my
chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth liter-
ature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of
early death and immortality, as I now look back
upon with wonder. Then it was that I wrote
Voces Fiddkmi, a series of dramatic monologues
in verse ; then that I indited the bulk of a covenant-
ing novel — like so many others, never finished.
Late I sat into the night, toiling (as I thought)
under the very dart of death, toiling to leave a
memory behind me. I feel moved to thrust aside
the curtain of the years, to hail that poor feverish

RANDOM MEMORIES 167

idiot, to bid him go to bed and clap Voces Fidelium
on the fire before he goes ; so clear does he appear
before me, sitting there between his candles in the
rose-scented room and the late night; so ridicu-
lous a picture (to my elderly wisdom) does the
fool present ! But he was driven to his bed at last
without miraculous intervention ; and the manner
of his driving sets the last touch upon this emi-
nently youthful business. The weather was then
so warm that I must keep the windows open ; the
night without was populous with moths. As the
late darkness deepened, my literary tapers bea-
coned forth more brightly ; thicker and thicker
came the dusty night-fliers, to gyrate for one
brilliant instant round the flame and fall in agonies
upon my paper. Flesh and blood could not endure
the spectacle; to capture immortality was doubt-
less a noble enterprise, but not to capture it at such
a cost of suffering; and out would go the candles,
and off would I go to bed in the darkness, raging
to think that the blow might fall on the morrow,
and there was Voces Fidelium still incomplete.
Well, the moths are all gone, and Voces Fidelium

i68 RANDOM MEMORIES

along with them ; only the fool is still on hand and
practises new follies.

Only one thing in connection with the harbour
tempted me, and that was the diving, an experience
I burned to taste of. But this was not to be, at
least in Anstruther; and the subject involves a
change of scene to the subarctic town of Wick.
You can never have dwelt in a country more un-
sightly than that part of Caithness, the land faintly
swelling, faintly falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow,
the fields divided by single slate stones set upon
their edge, the wind always singing in your ears
and (down the long road that led nowhere) thrum-
ming in the telegraph wires. Only as you ap-
proached the coast was there anything to stir the
heart. The plateau broke down to the North Sea
in formidable cliffs, the tall out-stacks rose like
pillars ringed about with surf, the coves were over-
brimmed with clamorous froth, the sea-birds
screamed, the wind sang in the thyme on the cliff's
edge; here and there, small ancient castles toppled
on the brim ; here and there, it was possible to dip
into a dell of shelter, where you might lie and tell

RANDOM MEMORIES 169

yourself you were a little warm, and hear (near
at hand) the whin-pods bursting in the afternoon
sun, and (farther off) the rumour of the turbulent
sea. As for Wick itself, it is one of the meanest
of man's towns, and situate certainly on the baldest
of God's bays. It lives for herring, and a strange
sight it is to see (of an afternoon) the heights of
Pulteney blackened by seaward-looking fishers, as
when a city crowds to a review — or, as when bees
have swarmed, the ground is horrible with lumps
and clusters ; and a strange sight, and a beautiful,
to see the fleet put silently out against a rising
moon, the sea-line rough as a wood with sails,
and ever and again and one after another, a boat
flitting swiftly by the silver disk. This mass of
fishers, this great fleet of boats, is out of all pro-
portion to the town itself; and the oars are manned
and the nets hauled by immigrants from the Long
Island (as we call the outer Hebrides), who come
for that season only, and depart again, if " the
take " be poor, leaving debts behind them. In a
bad year, the end of the herring fishery is there-
fore an exciting time; fights are common, riots

lyo RANDOM MEMORIES

often possible; an apple knocked from a child's
hand was once the signal for something like a war ;
and even when I was there, a gunboat lay in the
bay to assist the authorities. To contrary inter-
ests, it should be observed, the curse of Babel is here
added ; the Lews men are Gaelic speakers. Caith-
ness has adopted English ; an odd circumstance,
if you reflect that both must be largely Norsemen
by descent. I remember seeing one of the strong-
est instances of this division : a thing like a Punch-
and-Judy box erected on the flat grave-stones of
the churchyard ; from the hutch or proscenium —
I know not what to call it — an eldritch-looking
preacher laying down the law in Gaelic about some
one of the name of Pozvl, whom I at last divined
to be the apostle to the Gentiles ; a large congrega-
tion of the Lews men very devoutly listening ; and
on the outskirts of the crowd, some of the town's
children (to whom the whole affair was Greek and
Hebrew) profanely playing tigg. The same de-
scent, the same country, the same narrow sect of the
same religion, and all these bonds made very largely
nugatory by an accidental difference of dialect!

RANDOM MEMORIES 171

Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length
of the unfinished breakwater, in its cage of open
staging; the travellers (like frames of churches)
over-plumbing all; and away at the extreme end,
the divers toiling unseen on the foundation. On
a platform of loose planks, the assistants turned
their air-mills ; a stone might be swinging between
wind and water; underneath the swell ran gaily;
and from time to time, a mailed' dragon with a
window-glass snout came dripping up the ladder.
Youth is a blessed season after all; my stay at
Wick was in the year of Voces Fideliuni and the
rose-leaf room at Bailie Brown's; and already
I did not care two straws for literary glory. Post-
humous ambition perhaps requires an atmosphere
of roses ; and the more rugged excitant of Wick
east winds had made another boy of me. To go
down in the diving-dress, that was my absorbing
fancy; and with the countenance of a certain
handsome scamp of a diver, Bob Bain by name, I
gratified the whim.

It was grey, harsh, easterly weather, the swell
ran pretty high, and out in the open there were

172 RANDOM MEMORIES

" skipper's daughters," when I found myself at
last on the diver's platform, twenty pounds of
lead upon each foot and my whole person swollen
w^ith ply and ply of woollen underclothing. One
moment, the salt wind was whistling round my
night-capped head; the next, I v/as crushed al-
most double under the weight of the helmet. As
. that intolerable burthen was laid upon me, I could
have found it in my heart (only for shame's sake)
to cry off from the whole enterprise. But it was
too late. The attendants began to turn the hurdy-
gurdy, and the air to whistle through the tube;
some one screwed in the barred window of the
vizor; and I was cut off in a moment from my
fellow-men ; standing there in their midst, but
quite divorced from intercourse : a creature deaf
and dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them
from a climate of his own. Except that I could
move and feel, I was like a man fallen in a cata-
lepsy. But time was scarce given me to realise
my isolation; the weights were hung upon my
back and breast, the signal rope was thrust into
my unresisting hand ; and setting a twenty-pound

RANDOM MEMORIES 173

foot upon the ladder, I began ponderously to
descend.

Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight
fell. Looking up, I saw a low green heaven mot-
tled with vanishing bells of white ; looking around,
except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the
ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat
opaque but very restful and delicious. Thirty
rounds lower, I stepped off on the pierres perdiies
of the foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took
me by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read
it) of encouragement; and looking in at the crea-
ture's window, I beheld the face of Bain. There
we were, hand to hand and (when it pleased us)
eye to eye; and either might have burst himself
with shouting, and not a whisper come to his
companion's hearing. Each, in his own little
world of air, stood incommunicably separate.

Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five
minutes' drama at the bottom of the sea, which
at that moment possibly shot across my mind. He
was down with another, settling a stone of the
sea-wall. They had it well adjusted. Bob gave

174 RANDOM MEMORIES

the signal, the scissors were slipped, the stone set
home ; and it was time to turn to something else.
But still his companion remained bowed over the
block like a mourner on a tomb, or only raised
himself to make absurd contortions and mysteri-
ous signs unknown to the vocabulary of the diver.
There, then, these two stood for awhile, like the
dead and the living; till there flashed a fortunate
thought into Bob's mind, and he stooped, peered
through the window of that other world, and be-
lield the face of its inhabitant wet w4th streaming
tears. Ah! the man was in pain! And Bob,
glancing downward, saw what was the trouble :
the block had been lowered on the foot of that
unfortunate — he was caught alive at the bottom
of the sea under fifteen tons of rock.

That two men should handle a stone so heav}^
even swinging in the scissors, may appear strange
to the inexpert. These must bear in mind the
great density of the water of the sea, and the
surprising results of transplantation to that me-
dium. To understand a little what these are, and
how a man's weight, so far from being an en-

RANDOM MEMORIES 175

cnmbrance, is the very ground of his agihty, was
the chief lesson of my submarine experience. The
knowledge came upon me by degrees. As I began
to go forward with the hand of my estranged
companion, a world of tumbled stones was visible,
pillared with the weedy uprights of the staging:
overhead, a flat roof of green : a little in front,
the sea-wall, like an unfinished rampart. And
presently in our upward progress, Bob motioned
me to leap upon a stone ; I looked to see if he
were possibly in earnest, and he only signed to
me the more imperiously. Now the block stood
six feet high; it would have been quite a leap
to me unencumbered; with the breast and back
weights, and the twenty pounds upon each foot,
and the staggering load of the helmet, the thing
was out of reason. I laughed aloud in my tomb ;
and to prove to Bob how far he was astray, I
gave a little impulse from my toes. Up I soared
like a bird, my companion soaring at my side. As
high as to the stone, and then higher, I pursued
my impotent and empty flight. Even when the
strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my

176 RANDOM MEMORIES

heels continued their ascent ; so that I blew out
sideways like an autumn leaf, and must be hauled
in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack
of a sail, and propped upon my feet again like
an intoxicated sparrow. Yet a little higher on the
foundation, and we began to be affected by the
bottom of the swell, running there like a strong
breeze of wind. Or so I must suppose; for, safe
in my cushion of air, I was conscious of no im-
pact; only swayed idly like a weed, and was now
borne helplessly abroad, and now swiftly — and
yet with dream-like gentleness — impelled against
my guide. So does a child's balloon divagate upon
the currents of the air, and touch and slide off
again from every obstacle. So must have ineffec-
tually swung, so resented their inefficiency, those
light crowds that followed the Star of Hades, and
uttered exiguous voices in the land beyond Cocytus.
There was something strangely exasperating, as
well as strangely wearying, in these uncommanded
evolutions. It is bitter to return to infancy, to be
supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon
your feet, by the hand of some one else. The air

RANDOM MEMORIES 177

besides, as it is supplied to you by the busy mil-
lers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes
and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till
his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow
no longer. And for all these reasons — although
I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my sur-
roundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed,
to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there
about me, swift as humming-birds — yet I fancy
I was rather relieved than otherwise when Bain
brought me back to the ladder and signed to me
to mount. And there was one more experience
before me even then.f Of a sudden, my ascending
head passed into the trough of a swell. Out of
the green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy,
almost of sanguine light — the multitudinous seas
incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of crimson.
And then the glory faded into the hard, ugly day-
light of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a
grey sea, and a whisthng wind. \

Bob Bain had five shillings for iMis trouble, and
I had done what I desired. It was one of the best

things I got from my education as an engineer:

12

lyS RANDOM MEMORIES

of which however, as a way of Hfe, I wish to
speak with sympathy. It takes a man into the
open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour-
sides, which is the richest form of icUing; it car-
ries him to wild islands ; it gives him a taste of
the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him
with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands
upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of
any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable
life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries
him back and shuts him in an office! From the
roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing
boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with
a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous
headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply
his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of draw-
ing, or measure his inaccurate mind w^th several
pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth,
to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine
life against two parts of drudgery between four
walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully accept
the other.

Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay. But

RANDOM MEMORIES 179

how much better it was to hang in the cold wind
upon the pier, to go down with Bob Bain among
the roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat
coiling a wet rope and shouting orders — not al-
ways very wise — than to be warm and dry, and
dull, and dead-alive, in the most comfortable office.
And Wick itself had in those days a note of
originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt it
much. The old minister of Keiss would not preach,
in these degenerate times, for an hour and a half
upon the clock. The gipsies must be gone from
their caverns; where you might see, from the
mouth, the women tending their fire, like Meg
Merrilies, and the men sleeping off their coarse
potations; and where in winter gales, the surf
would beleaguer them closely, bursting in their
very door. A traveller to-day upon the Thurso
coach would scarce observe a little cloud of
smoke among the moorlands, and be told, quite
openly, it marked a private still. He w^ould not
indeed make that journey, for there is now no
Thurso coach. And even if he could, one little
thing that happened to me could never happen

i8o RANDOM MEMORIES

to him, or not with the same trenchancy of
contrast.

We had been upon the road all evening; the
coach-top was crowded with Lews fishers going
home, scarce anything but Gaelic had sounded in
my ears; and our way had lain throughout over
a moorish country very northern to behold. Latish
at night, though it was still broad day in our
subarctic latitude, we came down upon the shores
of the roaring Pentland Firth, that grave of mari-
ners ; on one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet Head
ran seaward; in front was the little bare, white
town of Castleton, its streets full of blowing sand ;
nothing beyond, but the North Islands, the great
deep, and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole. And
here, in the last imaginable place, there sprang up
young outlandish voices and a chatter of some
foreign speech ; and I saw, pursuing the coach
with its load of Hebridean fishers — as they had
pursued vettiirini up the passes of the Apennines
or perhaps along the grotto under Virgil's tomb —
two little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian vaga-
bonds, of twelve to fourteen years of age, one

RANDOM MEMORIES i8i

with a hurdy-gurdy, the other with a cage of
white mice. The coach passed on, and their small
Italian chatter died in the distance; and I was
left to marvel how they had wandered into that
country, and how they fared in it, and what they
thought of it, and when (if ever) they should see
again the silver wind-breaks run among the olives,
and the stone-pine stand guard upon Etruscan
sepulchres.

Upon any American, the strangeness of this
incident is somewhat lost. For as far back as he
goes in his own land, he will find some alien
camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or
Mexican half-blood, the negro in the South, these
are deep in the woods and far among the moun-
tains. But in an old, cold, and rugged country
such as mine, the days of immigration are long
at an end; and away up there, which was at that
time far beyond the northernmost extreme of rail-
ways, hard upon the shore of that ill-omened strait
of whirlpools, in a land of moors where no stran-
ger came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot
grouse or an antiquary to decipher runes, the

i82 RANDOM MEMORIES

presence of these small pedestrians struck the
mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from
the heather or an albatross come fishing in the
bay of Wick. They were as strange to their
surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old
Spanish grandee on the Fair Isle.

THE LANTERN-BEARERS

I

THESE boys congregated every autumn
about a certain easterly fisher-village,
where they tasted in a high degree the
glory of existence. The place was created seem-
ingly on purpose for the diversion of young gen-
tlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red
and many of them tiled; a number of fine trees
clustered about the manse and the kirkyard, and
turning the chief street into a shady alley; many
little gardens more than usually bright with
flowers ; nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding
in the backward parts ; a smell of fish, a genial
smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the
street-corners; shops with golf-balls and bottled
lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks (that
remarkable cigar) and the London Journal, dear
to me for its startling pictures, and a few novels,

i84 THE LANTERN-BEARERS

dear for their suggestive names: such, as well as
memory serves me, were the ingredients of the
town. These, you are to conceive posted on a
spit between tw^o sandy bays, and sparsely flanked
with villas — enough for the boys to lodge in
with their subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet
enough) to cocknify the scene: a haven in the
rocks in front : in front of that, a file of grey
islets : to the left, endless links and sand-wreaths,
a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping
rabbits and soaring gulls : to the right, a range
of seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond an-
other; the ruins of a mighty and ancient fortress
on the brink of one ; coves between — now
charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling with
wind and clamorous with bursting surges; the
dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and
southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and
clean and pungent of the sea — in front of all,
the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful
bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-
geese hanging round its summit like a great and
glittering smoke. This choice piece of seaboard

THE LANTERN-BEARERS 185

was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass,
in the eye of fancy, still flew the colours of King
James ; and in the ear of fancy the arches of
Tantallon still rang with horseshoe iron, and
echoed to the commands of Bell-the-Cat.

There was nothing to mar your days, if you
were a boy summering in that part, but the em-
barrassment of pleasure. You might golf if you
wanted ; but I seem to have been better employed.
You might secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk,
a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over
by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here
and there by the stream-side with roofless walls,
the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves
for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art
of smoking, it was even common for the boys
to harbour there; and you might have seen a
single penny pickwick, honestly shared in lengths
with a blunt knife, bestrew the glen with these
apprentices. Again, you might join our fishing-
parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-
geese, a covey of little anglers, boy and girl,
angling over each other's heads, to the much en-

i86 THE LANTERN-BEARERS

tanglement of lines and loss of podleys and con-
sequent shrill recrimination — shrill as the geese
themselves. Indeed, had that been all, you might
have done this often ; but though fishing be a
fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be regarded
as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of
honour that a boy should eat all that he had
taken. Or again, you might climb the Law, where
the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the buzz-
ing wind, and behold the face of many counties,
and the smoke and spires of many towns, and the
sails of distant ships. You might bathe, now in
the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically call
our summer, now in a gale of wind, with the
sand scourging your bare hide, your clothes thrash-
ing abroad from underneath their guardian stone,
the froth of the great breakers casting you head-
long ere it had drowned your knees. Or you
might explore the tidal rocks, above all in the
ebb of springs, when the very roots of the hills
were for the nonce discovered ; following my
leader from one group to another, groping in slip-
pery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in

THE LANTERN-BEARERS 187

pools after the abominable creatures of the sea,
and ever with an eye cast backward on the march
of the tide and the menaced line of your retreat.
And then you might go Crusoeing, a word that
covers all extempore eating in the open air: dig-
ging perhaps a house under the margin of the
links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware, and cooking
apples there — if they were truly apples, for I
sometimes suppose the merchant must have played
us off with some inferior and quite local fruit,
capable of resolving, in the neighbourhood of fire,
into mere sand and smoke and iodine; or per-
haps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on
sandwiches and visions in the grassy court, while
the wind hummed in the crumbling turrets; or
clambering along the coast, eat geans ^ (the worst,
I must suppose, in Christendom) from an adven-
turous gean-tree that had taken root under a cliff,
where it was shaken with an ague of east wind,
and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so
foreign among its bleak surroundings that to eat
of its produce was an adventure in itself.

1 Wild cherries.

i88 THE LANTERN-BEARERS

There are mingled some dismal memories with
so many that were joyous. Of the fisher-wife,
for instance, who had cut her throat at Canty
Bay ; and of how I ran with the other children
to the top of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse
of silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart,
bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the
bandage all bloody — horror ! — the fisher-wife
herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-ride
my thoughts, and even to-day (as I recall the
scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged in the
little old jail in the chief street ; but whether or
no she died there, with a wise terror of the worst,
I never inquired. She had been tippling; it was
but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and
hard that, after all these years, the poor crazy
sinner should be still pilloried on her cart in the
scrap-book of my memory. Nor shall I readily
forget a certain house in the Quadrant where a
visitor died, and a dark old woman continued to
dwell alone with the dead body; nor how this old
woman conceived a hatred to myself and one of
my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk,

THE LANTERN-BEARERS 189

as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened
a window in that house of mortality and cursed
us in a shrill voice and with a marrowy choice
of language. It was a pair of very colourless
urchins that fled down the lane from this re-
markable experience! But I recall with a more
doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and
exultation, the coil of equinoctial tempests; trum-
peting squalls, scouring flaws of rain ; the boats
with their reefed lugsails scudding for the har-
bour mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard
to make when the wind had any east in it; the
wives clustered with blowing shawls at the pier-
head, where (if fate was against them) they might
see boat and husband and sons — their whole
wealth and their whole family — engulfed under
their eyes; and (what I saw but once) a troop
of neighbours forcing such an unfortunate home-
ward, and she squalling and battling in their midst,
a figure scarcely human, a tragic Maenad.

These are things that I recall with interest; but
what my memory dwells upon the most, I have
been all this while withholding. It was a sport

I90 THE LANTERN-BEARERS

peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or
so of our two months' holiday there. Maybe it
still flourishes in its native spot; for boys and
their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces in-
scrutable to man; so that tops and marbles reap-
pear in their due season, regular like the sun and
moon; and the harmless art of knucklebones has
seen the fall of the Roman empire and the rise
of the United States. It may still flourish in its
native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded;
for I tried myself to introduce it on Tweedside,
and was defeated lamentably ; its charm being quite
local, like a country wine that cannot be exported.

The idle manner of it was this : —

Toward the end of September, when school-time
was drawing near and the nights were already
black, we would begin to sally from our respec-
tive villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lan-
tern. The thing was so well known that it had
worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain;
and the grocers, about the due time, began to
garnish their windows with our particular brand
of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist

THE LANTERN-BEARERS 191

upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the
rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They
smelled noisomely of bhstered tin ; they never
burned aright, though they would always burn
our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure
of them merely fanciful ; and yet a boy with a
bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing
more. The fishermen used lanterns about their
boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we
had got the hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes,
nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The
police carried them at their belts, and we had
plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pre-
tend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may
have had some haunting thoughts of; and we
had certainly an eye to past ages wdien lanterns
w^ere more common, and to certain story-books in
which we had found them to figure very largely.
But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing
was substantive; and to be a boy with a bulFs-
eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.

When two of these asses met, there would be
an anxious '' Have you got your lantern ? " and

192 THE LANTERN-BEARERS

a gratified '' Yes ! " That was the shibboleth, and
very needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep
our glory contained, none could recognise a lan-
tern-bearer, unless (like the pole-cat) by the smell.
Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly
of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts
above them — for the cabin was usually locked, or
choose out some hollow of the links where the
w^ind might whistle overhead. There the coats
would be unbuttoned and the bull's-eyes discovered ;
and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge
windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich
steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young
gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand
of the links or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-
boat, and delight themselves with inappropriate
talk. Woe is me that I may not give some speci-
mens — some of their foresights of life, or deep
inquiries into the rudiments of man and nature,
these were so fiery and so innocent, they were
so richly silly, so romantically young. But the
talk, at any rate, was but a condiment; and these
gatherings themselves only accidents in the career

THE LANTERN-BEARERS 193

of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bhss
was to walk by yourself in the black night; the
slide shut, the top-coat buttoned; not a ray es-
caping, wdiether to conduct your footsteps or to
make your glory public: a mere pillar of dark-
ness in the dark; and all the while, deep down
in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you
had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and
sing over the knowledge.

11

It is said that a poet has died young in the
breast of the most stolid. It may be contended,
rather, that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost
every case survives, and is the spice of life to his
possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility
and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagi-
nation. His life from without may seem but a
rude mound of mud; there will be some golden
chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells de-
lighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems
to the observer, he will have some kind of a bull's-
eye at his belt.

13

194 THE LANTERN-BEARERS

It would be hard to pick out a career more
cheerless than that of Dancer, the miser, as he
figures in the '' Old Bailey Reports," a prey to
the most sordid persecutions, the butt of his
neighbourhood, betrayed by his hired man, his
house beleaguered by the impish school-boy, and
he himself grinding and fuming and impotently
fleeing to the law against these pin-pricks. You
marvel at first that any one should willingly pro-
long a life so destitute of charm and dignity; and
then you call to memory that had he chosen, had
he ceased to be a miser, he could have been freed
at once from these trials, and might have built
himself a castle and gone escorted by a squadron.
For the love of more recondite joys, which we
cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy,
the man had willingly foregone both comfort and
I consideration. " His mind to him a kingdom
was " ; and sure enough, digging into that mind,
which seems at first a dust-heap, we unearth some
priceless jewels. For Dancer must have had the
love of power and the disdain of using it, a noble
character in itself; disdain of many pleasures, a

THE LANTERN-BEARERS 195

chief part of what is commonly called wisdom;
disdain of the inevitable end, that finest trait of
mankind; scorn of men's opinions, another ele-
ment of virtue; and at the back of all, a con-
science just like yours and mine, whining like a
cur, swindling like a thimble-rigger, but still
pointing (there or thereabout) to some conven-
tional standard. Here w^ere a cabinet portrait to
which Hawthorne perhaps had done justice; and
yet not Hawthorne either, for he was mildly
minded, and it lay not in him to create for us
that throb of the miser's pulse, his fretful energy
of gusto, his vast arms of ambition clutching in
he knows not what : insatiable, insane, a god with
a muck-rake. Thus, at least, looking in the bosom
of the miser, consideration detects the poet in the
full tide of life, with more, indeed, of the poetic
fire than usually goes to epics; and tracing that
mean man about his cold hearth, and to and fro
in his discomfortable house, spies within him a
blazing bonfire of delight. And so with others,
who do not live by bread alone, but by some
cherished and perhaps fantastic pleasure; who are

196 THE LANTERN-BEARERS

meat salesmen to the external eye, and possibly
to themselves are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or
Beethovens; who have not one virtue to rub
against another in the field of active life, and yet
perhaps, in the life of contemplation, sit with the
saints. We see them on the street, and we can
count their buttons ; but Heaven knows in what
they pride themselves! Heaven knows where they
have set their treasure!

There is one fable that touches very near the
quick of life : the fable of the monk who passed
into the woods, heard a bird break into song,
hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on
his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he
had been absent fifty years, and of all his com-
rades there survived but one to recognise him.
It is not only in the woods that this enchanter
carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings
in the most doleful places. The miser hears him
and chuckles, and the days are moments. With
no more apparatus than an ill-smelling lantern I
have evoked him on the naked links. All life that
is not merely mechanical is spun out of two

THE LANTERN-BEARERS 197

strands : seeking for that bird and hearing him.
And it is just this that makes Hfe so hard to value,
and the dehght of each so incommunicable. And
just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of
those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung
to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn
the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find
a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and
of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that
which we are ashamed to remember and that
which we are careless whether we forget; but of
the note of that time-devouring nightingale we
hear no news.

The case of these writers of romance is most
obscure. They have been boys and youths; they
have lingered outside the window of the beloved,
who was then most probably writing to some one
else; they have sat before a sheet of paper, and
felt themselves mere continents of congested
poetry, not one line of which would flow; they
have walked alone in the woods, they have walked
in cities under the countless lamps ; they have been
to sea, they have hated, they have feared, they have

198 THE LANTERN-BEARERS

longed to knife a man, and maybe done it; the
wild taste of life has stung their palate. Or, if
you deny them all the rest, one pleasure at least
they have tasted to the full — their books are
there to prove it — the keen pleasure of successful
literary composition. And yet they fill the globe
with volumes, whose cleverness inspires me with
despairing admiration, and whose consistent falsity
to all I care to call existence, with despairing
wrath. If I had no better hope than to continue
to revolve among the dreary and petty businesses,
and to be moved by the paltry hopes and fears with
which they surround and animate their heroes, I
declare I would die now. But there has never an
hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were
spent waiting at a railway junction, I would have
some scattering thoughts, I could count some
grains of memory, compared to which the whole
of one of these romances seems but dross.

These writers would retort (if I take them prop-
erly) that this was very true; that it was the same
w^ith themselves and other persons of (what they
call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were

THE LANTERN-BEARERS 199

exceptional, and should apparently be ashamed of
ourselves; but that our works must deal exclu-
sively with (what they call) the average man, who
was a prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to all
but the paltriest considerations. I accept the issue.
We can only know others by ourselves. The artis-
tic temperament (a plague on the expression!)
does not make us different from our fellow-men, or
it would make us incapable of writing novels ; and
the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just
like you and me, or he would not be average. It
was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham
sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman
knew very well, and showed very nobly, that the
average man was full of joys and full of a poetry
of his own. And this harping on life's dulness
and man's meanness is a loud profession of in-
competence ; it is one of two things : the cry of
the blind eye, / cannot see, or the complaint of the
dumb tongue, / cannot niter. To draw a life with-
out delights is to prove I have not realised it. To
picture a man without some sort of poetry —
well, it goes near to prove my case, for it shows

200 THE LANTERN-BEARERS

an author may have Httle enough. To see Dancer
only as a dirty, old, small-minded, impotently
fuming man, in a dirty house, besieged by Harrow
boys, and probably beset by small attorneys, is to
show myself as keen an observer as . . . the Har-
row boys. But these young gentlemen (with a
more becoming modesty) were content to pluck
Dancer by the coat-tails; they did not suppose
they had surprised his secret or could put him
living in a book : and it is there my error would
have lain. Or say that in the same romance — I
continue to call these books romances, in the hope
of giving pain — say that in the same romance,
which now begins really to take shape, I should
leave to speak of Dancer, and follow instead the
Harrow boys ; and say that I came on some such
business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links ;
and described the boys as very cold, spat upon by
flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of
which they were ; and their talk as silly and in-
decent, which it certainly was. I might upon these
lines, and had I Zola's genius, turn out, in a page
or so, a gem of literary art, render the lantern-light

THE LANTERN-BEARERS 201

with the touches of a master, and lay on the in-
decency with the ungrudging hand of love; and
when all was done, what a triumph would my pic-
ture be of shallowness and dulness ! how it would
have missed the point ! how it would have belied
the boys ! To the ear of the stenographer, the talk
is merely silly and indecent; but ask the boys
themselves, and they are discussing (as it is highly
proper they should) the possibilities of existence.
To the eye of the observer they are wet and cold
and drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and
they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the
ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.

Ill

For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is
often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a
mere accessory, like the lantern, it may reside, like
Dancer's, in the mysterious inwards of psychology.
It may consist with perpetual failure, and find
exercise in the continued chase. It has so little
bond with externals (such as the observer scribbles
in his note-book) that it may even touch them

202 THE LANTERN-BEARERS

not ; and the man's true life, for which he consents
to hve, he altogether in the field of fancy. The
clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning
battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker reap-
ing triumph in the arts : all leading another life,
plying another trade from that they chose; like
the poet's housebuilder, who, after all is cased in
stone,

" By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts,
Rebuilds it to his liking."

In such a case the poetry runs underground. The
observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all
abroad. For to look at the man is but to court
deception. We shall see the trunk from which he
draws his nourishment ; but he himself is above
and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed
through by winds and nested in by nightingales.
And the true realism were that of the poets, to
climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some
glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And the
true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the
poets : to find out where joy resides, and give it a
voice far beyond singing.

THE LANTERN-BEARERS 203

For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of
the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the
explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not
the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links
is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly
spectral unreality of realistic books. Hence, when
we read the English realists, the incredulous won-
der with which we observe the hero's constancy
under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he
bears up with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures
the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his whole
unfeatured wilderness of an existence, instead of
seeking relief in drink or foreign travel. Hence
in the French, in that meat-market of middle-aged
sensuality, the disgusted surprise with which w^e
see the hero drift sidelong, and practically quite
untempted, into every description of misconduct
and dishonour. In each, we miss the personal
poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow
work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems
to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead
like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon
into the colours of the sunset; each is true, each

204 THE LANTERN-BEARERS

inconceivable; for no man lives in the external
truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm,
phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the
painted windows and the storied walls.

Of this falsity we have had a recent example
from a man who knows far better — Tolstoi's
Powers of Darkness. Here is a piece full of force
and truth, yet quite untrue. For before Mikita
was led into so dire a situation he was tempted, and
temptations are beautiful at least in part ; and a
work which dwells on the ugliness of crime and
gives no hint of any loveliness in the temptation,
sins against the modesty of life, and even when a
Tolstoi writes it, sinks to melodrama. The peas-
ants are not understood; they saw their life in
fairer colours; even the deaf girl was clothed in
poetry for Mikita, or he had never fallen. And
so, once again, even an Old Bailey melodrama,
without some brightness of poetry and lustre of
existence, falls into the inconceivable and ranks
with fairy tales.

THE LANTERN-BEARERS 205

IV

In nobler books we are moved with something
Hke the emotions of Hfe; and this emotion is very
variously provoked. We are so moved when Le-
vine labours in the field, when Andre sinks beyond
emotion, when Richard Feverel and Lucy Des-
borough meet beside the river, when Antony, " not
cowardly, puts off his helmet," when Kent has
infinite pity on the dying Lear, when, in Dos-
toieffsky's Despised mid Rejected, the uncom-
plaining hero drains his cup of suffering and
virtue. These are notes that please the great heart
of man. Not only love, and the fields, and the
bright face of danger, but sacrifice and death and
unmerited suffering humbly supported, touch in us
the vein of the poetic. We love to think of them,
we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful that
we may prove heroes also.

We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser
matters. Here is the door, here is the open air.
Itiir in mitiqiiam silvam.

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

THE past is all of one texture — whether
feigned or suffered — whether acted out
in three dimensions, or only witnessed
in that small theatre of the brain which we keep
brightly lighted all night long, after the jets are
down, and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in
the remainder of the body. There is no distinction
on the face of our experiences ; one is vivid indeed,
and one dull, and one pleasant, and another ago-
nising to remember; but which of them is what
we call true, and which a dream, there is not one
hair to prove. The past stands on a precarious
footing; another straw split in the field of meta-
physic, and behold us robbed of it. There is scarce
a family that can count four generations but lays
a claim to some dormant title or some castle and
estate: a claim not prosecutable in any court of
law, but flattering to the fancy and a great alle-

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 207

viation of idle hours. A man's claim to his own
past is yet less valid. A paper might turn up (in
proper story-book fashion) in the secret drawer
of an old ebony secretary, and restore your family
to its ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a
certain West Indian islet (not far from St. Kitt's,
as beloved tradition hummed in my young ears)
which was once ours, and is now unjustly some one
else's, and for that matter (in the state of the sugar
trade) is not worth anything to anybody. I do
not say that these revolutions are likely; only no
man can deny that they are possible ; and the past,
on the other hand, is lost for ever : our old days
and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world
in which these scenes were acted, all brought down
to the same faint residuum as a last night's dream,
to some incontinuous images, and an echo in the
chambers of the brain. Not an hour, not a mood,
not a glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all
gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us robbed
of it, conceive that little thread of memory that we
trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge ; and in
what naked nullity should we be left! for we only

2o8 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

guide ourselves, and only know ourselves, by these
air-painted pictures of the past.

Upon these grounds, there are some among us
who claimed to have lived longer and more richly
than their neighbours; wdien they lay asleep they
claim they were still active; and among the treas-
ures of memory that all men review for their
amusement, these count in no second place the
harvests of their dreams. There is one of this
kind whom I have in my eye, and whose case is
perhaps unusual enough to be described. He was
from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer.
When he had a touch of fever at night, and the
room swelled and shrank, and his clothes, hang-
ing on a nail, now loomed up instant to the big-
ness of a church, and now drew away into a
horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness,
the poor soul was very well aware of what must
follow, and struggled hard against the approaches
of that slumber which was the beginning of sor-
rows. But his struggles were in vain ; sooner
or later the night-hag would have him by the
throat, and pluck him, strangling and screaming,

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 209

from his sleep. His dreams were at times common-
place enough, at times very strange : at times they
were almost formless, he would be haunted, for
instance, by nothing more definite than a certain
hue of brown, which he did not mind in the least
while he was awake, but feared and loathed while
he was dreaming; at times, again, they took on
every detail of circumstance, as when once he
supposed he must swallow the populous world, and
awoke screaming with the horror of the thought.
The two chief troubles of his very narrow exist-
ence — the practical and everyday trouble of school
tasks and the ultimate and airy one of hell and
judgment — were often confounded together into
one appalling nightmare. He seemed to himself
to stand before the Great White Throne; he was
called on, poor little devil, to recite some form
of words, on which his destiny depended; his
tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped
for him; and he would awake, clinging to the
curtain-rod with his knees to his chin.

These were extremely poor experiences, on the

whole; and at that time of life my dreamer

14

2IO A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

would have very willingly parted with his power
of dreams. But presently, in the course of his
growth, the cries and physical contortions passed
away, seemingly for ever; his visions were still
for the most part miserable, but they were more
constantly supported; and he would awake with
no more extreme symptom than a flying heart, a
freezing scalp, cold sweats, and the speechless
midnight fear. His dreams, too, as befitted a
mind better stocked with particulars, became more
circumstantial, and had more the air and con-
tinuity of life. The look of the world beginning
to take hold on his attention, scenery came to
play a part in his sleeping as well as in his wak-
ing thoughts, so that he would take long, unevent-
ful journeys and see strange towns and beautiful
places as he lay in bed. And, what is more sig-
nificant, an odd taste that he had for the Georgian
costume and for stories laid in that period of
English history, began to rule the features of his
dreams ; so that he masqueraded there in a three-
cornered hat, and was much engaged with Jacobite
conspiracy between the hour for bed and that for

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 211

breakfast. About the same time, he began to
read in his dreams — tales, for the most part, and
for the most part after the manner of G. P. R.
James, but so incredibly more vivid and moving
than any printed book, that he has ever since been
malcontent with literature.

And then, while he was yet a student, there
came to him a dream-adventure which he has no
anxiety to repeat; he began, that is to say, to
dream in sequence and thus to lead a double life
— one of the day, one of the night — one that
he had every reason to believe was the true one,
another that he had no means of proving to be
false. I should have said he studied, or was by
way of studying, at Edinburgh College, which (it
may be supposed) was how I came to know him.
Well, in his dream life, he passed a long day in
the surgical theatre, his heart in his mouth, his
teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations
and the abhorred dexterity of surgeons. In a
heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into
the South Bridge, turned up the High Street,
and entered the door of a tall land, at the top of

212 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

which he supposed himself to lodge. All night
long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs,
stair after stair in endless series, and at every
second flight a flaring lamp with a reflector. All
night long, he brushed by single persons passing
downward — beggarly women of the street, great,
weary, muddy labourers, poor scarecrows of men,
pale parodies of women — but all drowsy and
weary like himself, and all single, and all brush-
ing against him as they passed. In the end, out
of a northern window, he would see day begin-
ning to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent,
turn to descend, and in a breath be back again
upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet,
haggard dawn, trudging to another day of mon-
strosities and operations. Time went quicker in
the life of dreams, some seven hours (as near as
he can guess) to one; and it went, besides, more
intensely, so that the gloom of these fancied ex-
periences clouded the day, and he had not shaken
off their shadow ere it was time to lie down and
to renew them. I cannot tell how long it was
that he endured this discipline; but it was long

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 213

enough to leave a great black blot upon his mem-
ory, long enough to send him, trembling for his
reason, to the doors of a certain doctor; where-
upon with a simple draught he was restored to
the common lot of man.

The poor gentleman has since been troubled by
nothing of the sort; indeed, his nights were for
some while like other men's, now blank, now
chequered with dreams, and these sometimes
charming, sometimes appalling, but except for an
occasional vividness, of no extraordinary kind.
I will just note one of these occasions, ere I pass
on to what makes my dreamer truly interesting.
It seemed to him that he was in the first floor
of a rough hill-farm. The room showed some
poor efforts at gentility, a carpet on the floor,
a piano, I think, against the wall; but, for all
these refinements, there was no mistaking he was
in a moorland place, among hillside people, and
set in miles of heather. He looked down from
the window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed
to have been long disused. A great, uneasy still-
ness lay upon the world. There was no sign of

214 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

the farm-folk or of any live-stock, save for an
old, brown, curly dog of the retriever breed, who
sat close in against the wall of the house and
seemed to be dozing. Something about this dog
disquieted the dreamer; it was quite a nameless
feeling, for the beast looked right enough — in-
deed, he was so old and dull and dusty and
broken dowai, that he should rather have awak-
ened pity; and yet the conviction came and grew
upon the dreamer that this was no proper dog at
all, but something hellish. A great many dozing
summer flies hummed about the yard; and pres-
ently the dog thrust forth his paw, caught a fly
in his open palm, carried it to his mouth like an
ape, and looking suddenly up at the dreamer in
the window, w^inked to him with one eye. The
dream went on, it matters not how it went; it
was a good dream as dreams go; but there was
nothing in the sequel worthy of that devilish
brown dog. And the point of interest for me lies
partly in that very fact : that having found so
singular an incident, my imperfect dreamer should
prove unable to carry the tale to a fit end and

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 215

fall back on indescribable noises and indiscrimi-
nate horrors. It would be different now; he
knows his business better!

For, to approach at last the point : This honest
fellow had long been in the custom of setting
himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father
before him; but these were irresponsible inven-
tions, told for the teller's pleasure, with no eye
to the crass public or the thwart reviewer : tales
wiiere a thread might be dropped, or one adven-
ture quitted for another, on fancy's least sugges-
tion. So that the little people who manage man's
internal theatre had not as yet received a very
rigorous training; and played upon their stage
like children who should have slipped into the
house and found it empty, rather than like drilled
actors performing a set piece to a huge hall of
faces. But presently my dreamer began to turn
his former amusement of story-telling to (what
is called) account; by which I mean that he
began to write and sell his tales. Here was he,
and here were the little people who did that part
of his business, in quite new conditions. The

2i6 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

stories must now be trimmed and pared and set
upon all fours, they must run from a beginning
to an end and fit (after a manner) with the laws
of life; the pleasure, in one word, had become
a business ; and that not only for the dreamer,
but for the little people of his theatre. These
understood the change as well as he. When he
lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no
longer sought amusement, but printable and profit-
able tales; and after he had dozed off in his
box-seat, his little people continued their evolu-
tions with the same mercantile designs. All other
forms of dream deserted him but two: he still
occasionally reads the most delightful books, he
still visits at times the most delightful places;
and it is perhaps worthy of note that to these
same places, and to one in particular, he returns
at intervals of months and years, finding new
field-paths, visiting new neighbours, beholding that
happy valley under new effects of noon and dawn
and sunset. But all the rest of the family of visions
is quite lost to him : the common, mangled ver-
sion of yesterday's affairs, the raw-head-and-

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 217

bloody-bones nightmare, rumoured to be the child
of toasted cheese — these and their like are gone;
and, for the most part, whether awake or asleep,
he is simply occupied — he or his little people —
in consciously making stories for the market. This
dreamer (like many other persons) has encoun-
tered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. When
the bank begins to send letters and the butcher
to linger at the back gate, he sets to belabouring
his brains after a story, for that is his readiest
money-winner; and, behold! at once the little
people begin to bestir themselves in the same
quest, and labour all night long, and all nigli^t
long set before him truncheons of tales upon their
lighted theatre. No fear of his being frightened
now; the flying heart and the frozen scalp are
things by-gone ; applause, growing applause, grow-
ing interest, growing exultation in his own clever-
ness (for he takes all the credit), and at last a
jubilant leap to wakefulness, w^ith the cry, " I have
it, that '11 do ! " upon his lips : with such and simi-
lar emotions he sits at these nocturnal dramas,
with such outbreaks, like Claudius in the play, he

2i8 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

scatters the performance in the midst. Often
enough the waking is a disappointment : he has
been too deep asleep, as I explain the thing;
drowsiness has gained his little people, they have
gone stumbling and maundering through their
parts ; and the play, to the awakened mind, is
seen to be a tissue of absurdities. And yet how
often have these sleepless Brownies done him
honest service, and given him, as he sat idly tak-
ing his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he
could fashion for himself.

Here is one, exactly as it came to him. It
seemed he was the son of a very rich and wicked
man, the owner of broad acres and a most dam-
nable temper. The dreamer (and that was the
son) had lived much abroad, on purpose to avoid
his parent; and when at length he returned to
England, it w^as to find him married again to a
young wife, who was supposed to suffer cruelly
and to loathe her yoke. Because of this marriage
(as the dreamer indistinctly understood) it was
desirable for father and son to have a meeting;
and yet both being proud and both angry, neither

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 219

would condescend upon a visit. Meet they did
accordingly, in a desolate, sandy country by the
sea; and there they quarrelled, and the son, stung
by some intolerable insult, struck down the father
dead. No suspicion was aroused; the dead man
was found and buried, and the dreamer succeeded
to the broad estates, and found himself installed
under the same roof with his father's widow, for
whom no provision had been made. These two
lived very much alone, as people may after a be-
reavement, sat down to table together, shared the
long evenings, and grew daily better friends ;
until it seemed to him of a sudden that she was
prying about dangerous matters, that she had
conceived a notion of his guilt, that she watched
him and tried hirn with questions. He drew back
from her company as men draw back from a
precipice suddenly discovered; and yet so strong
was the attraction that he would drift again and
again into the old intimacy, and again and again
be startled back by some suggestive question or
some inexplicable meaning in her eye. So they
lived at cross purposes, a life full of broken dia-

220 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

logue, challenging glances, and suppressed passion ;
until, one day, he saw the woman slipping from
the house in a veil, followed her to the station,
followed her in the train to the sea-side country,
and out over the sand-hills to the very place where
the murder was done. There she began to grope
among the bents, he watching her, flat upon his
face; and presently she had something in her
hand — I cannot remember what it was, but it
was deadly evidence against the dreamer — and
as she held it up to look at it, perhaps from the
shock of the discovery, her foot slipped, and she
hung at some peril on the brink of the tall sand-
wreaths. He had no thought but to spring up
and rescue her; and there they stood face to
face, she with that deadly matter openly in her
hand — his very presence on the spot another
link of proof. It was plain she was about to
speak, but this was more than he could bear —
he could bear to be lost, but not to talk of it
with his destroyer; and he cut her short with
trivial conversation. ' Arm in arm, they returned
together to the train, talking he knew not what,

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 221

made the journey back in the same carriage, sat
down to dinner, and passed the evening in the
drawing-room as in the past. But suspense and
fear drummed in the dreamer's bosom. ^' She has
not denounced me yet " — so his thoughts ran —
" when win she denounce me ? Will it be to-
morrow ? " And it was not to-morrow, nor the
next day, nor the next ; and their life settled
back on the old terms, only that she seemed
kinder than before, and that, as for him, the
burthen of his suspense and wonder grew daily
more unbearable, so that he wasted away like a
man with a disease. Once, indeed, he broke all
bounds of decency, seized an occasion when she
was abroad, ransacked her room, and at last,
hidden away among her jewels, found the damn-
ing evidence. There he stood, holding this thing,
which was his life, in the hollow of his hand, and
marvelling at her inconsequent behaviour, that she
should seek, and keep, and yet not use it; and
then the door opened, and behold herself. So,
once more, they stood, eye to eye, with the evi-
dence between them ; and once more she raised

222 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

to him a face brimming with some communica-
tion ; and once more he shied away from speech
and cut her off. But before he left the room,
which he had turned upside down, he laid back
his death-warrant where he had found it; and at
that, her face lighted up. The next thing he
heard, she was explaining to her maid, with some
ingenious falsehood, the disorder of her things.
Flesh and blood could bear the strain no longer;
and I think it was the next morning (though
chronology is always hazy in the theatre of the
mind) that he burst from his reserve. They had
been breakfasting together in one corner of a
great, parqueted, sparely furnished room of many
windows; all the time of the meal she had tor-
tured him with sly allusions; and no sooner were
the servants gone, and these two protagonists alone
together, than he leaped to his feet. She too
sprang up, with a pale face; with a pale face,
she heard him as he raved out his complaint:
Why did she torture him so? she knew all, she
knew he was no enemy to her; why did she not
denounce him at once? what signified her whole

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 223

behaviour? why did she torture him? and yet
again, why did she torture him? And when he
had done, she fell upon her knees, and with out-
stretched hands : " Do you not understand ? " she
cried. *' I love you! "

Hereupon, with a pang of w^onder and mercan-
tile delight, the dreamer awoke. His mercantile
delight was not of long endurance; for it soon
became plain that in this spirited tale there were
unmarketable elements; which is just the reason
why you have it here so briefly told. But his won-
der has still kept growing ; and I think the reader's
will also, if he consider it ripely. For now he sees
why I speak of the little people as of substantive
inventors and performers. To the end they had
kept their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer
(having excellent grounds for valuing his can-
dour) that he had no guess whatever at the motive
of the woman — the hinge of the whole well-
invented plot — until the instant of that highly
dramatic declaration. It was not his tale; it was
the little people's! And observe: not only was the
secret kept, the story was told with really guileful

224 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is (in
the cant phrase) psychologically correct, and the
emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising cli-
max. I am awake now, and I know this trade;
and yet I cannot better it. I am awake, and I live
by this business ; and yet I could not outdo — could
not perhaps equal — that crafty artifice (as of
some old, experienced carpenter of plays, some
Dennery or Sardou) by which the same situation
is twice presented and the two actors twice brought
face to face over the evidence, only once it is in
her hand, once in his — and these in their due
order, the least dramatic first. The more I think
of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world
my question: Who are the Little People? They
are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond
doubt ; they share in his financial worries and have
an eye to the bank-book; they share plainly in his
training; they have plainly learned like him to
build the scheme of a considerate story and to
arrange emotion in progressive order ; only I think
they have more talent ; and one thing is beyond
doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 225

a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of
where they aim. Who are they, then? and who is
the dreamer?

Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that,
for he is no less a person than myself ; — as I
might have told you from the beginning, only that
the critics murmur over my consistent egotism;
— and as I am positively forced to tell you now,
or I could advance but little farther with my story.
And for the Little People, wdiat shall I say they
are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who
do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep,
and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me
as well, when I am wide aw^ake and fondly suppose
I do it for myself. That part which is done while
I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond con-
tention ; but that which is done when I am up and
about is by no means necessarily mine, since all
goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even
then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my con-
science. For myself — what I call I, my con-
science ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless

he has changed his residence since Descartes, the

15

226 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

man with the conscience and the variable bank-
account, the man with the hat and the boots, and
the privilege of voting and not carrying his candi-
date at the general elections — I am sometimes
tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all, but
a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger
or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears
in actuality ; so that, by that account, the whole
of my published fiction should be the single-handed
product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some
unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back
garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share
(which I cannot prevent him getting) of the pud-
ding. I am an excellent adviser, something like
Moliere's servant; I pull back and I cut down;
and I dress the whole in the best words and sen-
tences that I can find and make; I hold the pen,
too; and I do the sitting at the table, which is
about the worst of it; and when all is done, I
make up the manuscript and pay for the registra-
tion; so that, on the whole, I have some claim to
share, though not so largely as I do, in the profits
of our common enterprise.

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 227

I can but give an instance or so of what part is
done sleeping and what part awake, and leave the
reader to share what laurels there are, at his own
nod, between myself and my collaborators ; and
to do this I will first take a book that a number of
persons have been polite enough to read, the
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I had
long been trying to write a story on this subject,
to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of
man's double being which must at times come in
upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking
creature. I had even written one, The Travelling
Companion, which was returned by an editor on
the plea that it was a work of genius and indecent,
and which I burned the other day on the ground
that it was not a work of genius, and that Jekyll
had supplanted it. Then came one of those finan-
cial fluctuations to which (with an elegant mod-
esty) I have hitherto referred in the third person.
For two days I went about racking my brains for
a plot of any sort; and on the second night I
dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene
afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, pursued

228 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

for some crime, took the powder and underwent
the change in the presence of his pursuers. All
the rest w^as made awake, and consciously, al-
though I think I can trace in much of it the man-
ner of my Brownies. The meaning of the tale is
therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in my
garden of Adonis, and tried one body after another
in vain ; indeed, I do most of the morality, worse
luck! and my Brownies have not a rudiment of
what we call a conscience. Mine, too, is the set-
ting, mine the characters. All that was given me
was the matter of three scenes, and the central
idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary.
Will it be thought ungenerous, after I have been
so liberally ladling out praise to my unseen col-
laborators, if I here toss them over, bound hand
and foot, into the arena of the critics? For the
business of the powders, w^hich so many have cen-
sured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but
the Brownies'. Of another tale, in case the reader
should have glanced at it, I may say a word : the
not very defensible story of Olalla. Here the
court, the mother, the mother's niche, Olalla,

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 229

Olalla's chamber, the meetings on the stair, the
broken window, the ugly scene of the bite, were all
given me in bulk and detail as I have tried to
write them; to this I added only the external
scenery (for in my dream I never was beyond the
court), the portrait, the characters of Felipe and
the priest, the moral, such as it is, and the last
pages, such as, alas ! they are. And I may even
say that in this case the moral itself was given me ;
for it arose immediately on a comparison of the
mother and the daughter, and from the hideous
trick of atavism in the first. Sometimes a para-
bolic sense is still more undeniably present in a
dream ; sometimes I cannot but suppose my
Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet in no
case with what would possibly be called a moral
in a tract ; never with the ethical narrowness ;
conveying hints instead of life's larger limitations
and that sort of sense which we seem to perceive
in the arabesque of time and space.

For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies
are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot and
hot, full of passion and the picturesque,- alive with

230 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

animating incident; and they have no prejudice
against the supernatural. But the other day they
gave me a surprise, entertaining me with a love-
story, a little April comedy, which I ought cer-
tainly to hand over to the author of A Chance
Acquaintance, for he could write it as it should
be written, and I am sure (although I mean to try)
that I cannot. — But who would have supposed
that a Brownie of mine should invent a tale for
Mr. Howells?

BEGGARS

IN a pleasant, airy, up-hill country, it was my
fortune when I was young to make the ac-
quaintance of a certain beggar. I call him
beggar, though he usually allowed his coat and his
shoes (which were open-mouthed, indeed) to beg
for him. He was the wreck of an athletic man,
tall, gaunt, and bronzed ; far gone in consumption,
with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken
on his face; but still active afoot, still with the
brisk military carriage, the ready military salute.
Three ways led through this piece of country ; and
as I was inconstant in my choice, I believe he must
often have awaited me in vain. But often enough,
he caught me; often enough, from some place of
ambush by the roadside, he would spring suddenly
forth in the regulation attitude, and launching at
once into his inconsequential talk, fall into step

232 BEGGARS

with me upon my farther course. " A fine morn-
ing, sir, though perhaps a trifle incHning to rain.
I hope I see you well, sir. Why, no, sir, I don't
feel as hearty myself as I could wish, but I am
keeping about my ordinary. I am pleased to meet
you on the road, sir. I assure you I quite look
forward to one of our little conversations." He
loved the sound of his own voice inordinately, and
though (with something too off-hand to call ser-
vility) he would always hasten to agree with any-
thing you said, yet he could never suffer you to
say it to an end. By what transition he slid to his
favourite subject I have no memory ; but we had
never been long together on the way before he was
dealing, in a very military manner, with the Eng-
lish poets. " Shelley was a fine poet, sir, though
a trifle atheistical in his opinions. His Queen Mab,
sir, is quite an atheistical work. Scott, sir, is not
so poetical a writer. With the works of Shake-
speare I am not so well acquainted, but he was a
fine poet. Keats — John Keats, sir — he was a
very fine poet." With such references, such trivial
criticism, such loving parade of his own knowledge.

BEGGARS 233

he would beguile the road, striding forward up-
hill, his staff now clapped to the ribs of his deep,
resonant chest, now swinging in the air with the
remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and
all the while his toes looking out of his boots,
and his shirt looking out of his elbows, and death
looking out of his smile, and his big, crazy frame
shaken by accesses of cough.

He would often go the whole way home with
me : often to borrow a book, and that book always
a poet. Off he would march, to continue his men-
dicant rounds, with the volume slipped into the
pocket of his ragged coat; and although he would
sometimes keep it quite awhile, yet it came always
back again at last, not much the worse for its
travels into beggardom. And in this way, doubt-
less, his knowledge grew and his glib, random
criticism took a wider range. But my library was
not the first he had drawn upon : at our first en-
counter, he was already brimful of Shelley and the
atheistical Queen Mab, and '' Keats — John Keats,
sir." And I have often wondered how he came
by these accjuirements ; just as I often wondered

C34 BEGGARS

how he fell to be a beggar. He had served
through the Mutiny — of which (like so many
people) he could tell practically nothing beyond
the names of places, and that it was '' difficult
work, sir," and very iiot, or that so-and-so was
" a very fine commander, sir." He was far too
smart a man to have remained a private; in the
nature of things, he must have won his stripes.
And yet here he w^as without a pension. When I
touched on this problem, he would content him-
self with diffidently offering me advice. '' A man
should be very careful when he is young, sir.
If you '11 excuse me saying so, a spirited young
gentleman like yourself, sir, should be very care-
ful. I was perhaps a trifle inclined to atheistical
opinions myself." For (perhaps with a deeper
wisdom than we are inclined in these days to
admit) he plainly bracketed agnosticism with
beer and skittles.

Keats — John Keats, sir, — and Shelley were
his favourite bards. I cannot remember if I tried
him with Rossetti ; but I know his taste to a hair,
and if ever I did, he must have doted on that

BEGGARS 235

author. What took him was a richness in the
speech ; he loved the exotic, the unexpected word ;
the moving cadence of a phrase; a vague sense of
emotion (about nothing) in the very letters of the
alphabet : the romance of language. His honest
head was very nearly empty, his intellect like a
child's; and when he read his favourite authors,
he can almost never have understood what he was
reading. Yet the taste was not only genuine, it
was exclusive ; I tried in vain to offer him novels ;
he would none of them ; he cared for nothing but
romantic language that he could not understand.
The case may be commoner than we suppose. I
am reminded of a lad who was laid in the next cot
to a friend of mine in a public hospital, and who
was no sooner installed than he sent out (perhaps
with his last pence) for a cheap Shakespeare. My
friend pricked up his ears; fell at once in talk
with his new neighbour, and was ready, when the
book arrived, to make a singular discovery. For
this lover of great literature understood not one
sentence out of twelve, and his favourite part was
that of which he understood the least — the inimi-

236 BEGGARS

table, mouth-filling rodomontade of the ghost in
Hamlet. It was a bright day in hospital when my
friend expounded the sense of this beloved jargon :
a task for which I am willing to believe my friend
was very fit, though I can never regard it as an
easy one. I know mdeed a point or two, on whicli
I would gladly question Mr. Shakespeare, that
lover of big words, could he revisit the glimpses
of the moon, or could I myself climb backward to
the spacious days of Elizabeth. But in the second
case, I should most likely pretermit these ques-
tionings, and take my place instead in the pit at
the Blackfriars, to hear the actor in his favourite
part, playing up to Mr. Burbage, and rolling out
— as I seem to hear him — with a ponderous
gusto —

" Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd."

What a pleasant chance, if we could go there in a
party ! and what a surprise for Mr. Burbage. when
the ghost received the honours of the evening!

As for my old soldier, like Mr. Burbage and
Mr. Shakespeare, he is long since dead; and now
lies buried, I suppose, and nameless and quite

BEGGARS 237

forgotten, in some poor city graveyard. — But not
for me, you brave heart, have you been buried !
For me, you are still afoot, tasting the sun and air,
and striding southward. By the groves of Comis-
ton and beside the Hermitage of Braid, by the
Hunters' Tryst, and where the curlews and plovers
cry around Fairmilehead, I see and hear you, stal-
wartly carrying your deadly sickness, cheerfully
discoursing of uncomprehended poets.

II

The thought of the old soldier recalls that of
another tramp, his counterpart. This was a little,
lean, and fiery man, with the eyes of a dog and the
face of a gipsy; whom I found one morning
encamped with his wife and children and his
grinder's wheel, beside the burn of Kinnaird. To
this beloved dell I went, at that time, daily; and
daily the knife-grinder and I (for as long as his
tent continued pleasantly to interrupt my little
wilderness) sat on two stones, and smoked, and
plucked grass, and talked to the tune of the brown
water. His children were mere whelps, they

238 BEGGARS

fought and bit among the fern hke vermin. His
wife was a mere squaw ; I saw her gather brush
and tend the kettle, but she never ventured to
address her lord while I was present. The tent
was a mere gipsy hovel, like a sty for pigs. But
the grinder himself had the fine self-sufficiency and
grave politeness of the hunter and the savage; he
did me the honours of this dell, which had been
mine but the day before, took me far into the
secrets of his life, and used me (I am proud to
remember) as a friend.

Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the
national complaint. Unlike him, he had a vulgar
taste in letters ; scarce flying higher than the story
papers; probably finding no difference, certainly
seeking none, between Tannahill and Burns; his
noblest thoughts, whether of poetry or music, ade-
quately embodied in that somewhat obvious ditty,

" Will ye gang, lassie, gang
To the braes o' Balquidder " :

— which is indeed apt to echo in the ears of Scot-
tish children, and to him, in view of his experience,
must have found a special directness of address.

BEGGARS 239

But if he had no fine sense of poetry in letters, he
felt vnth a deep joy the poetry of life. You should
have heard him speak of what he loved; of the
tent pitched beside the talking water; of the stars
overhead at night ; of the blest return of morning,
the peep of day over the moors, the awaking birds
among the birches; how he abhorred the long
winter shut in cities ; and with what delight, at
the return of the spring, he once more pitched his
camp in the living out-of-doors. But we were a
pair of tramps; and to you, who are doubtless
sedentary and a consistent first-class passenger in
life, he would scarce have laid himself so open;
— to you, he might have been content to tell his
story of a ghost — that of a buccaneer with his
pistols as he lived — whom he had once encoun-
tered in a sea-side cave near Buckie; and that
would have been enough, for that would have
shown you the mettle of the man. Here was a
piece of experience solidly and livingly built up
in words, here was a story created, teres atque
rotund us.

And to think of the old soldier, that lover of the

240 BEGGARS

literary bards ! He had visited stranger spots than
any sea-side cave; encountered men more terrible
than any spirit; done and dared and suffered in
that incredible, unsung epic of the Mutiny War;
pla3^ed his part with the field force of Delhi, be-
leaguering and beleaguered; shared in that en-
during, savage anger and contempt of death and
decency that, for long months together, bedevil'd
and inspired the army; was hurled to and fro in
the battle-smoke of the assault ; was there, per-
haps, where Nicholson fell ; was there when the
attacking column, with hell upon every side, found
the soldier's enemy — strong drink, and the lives
of tens of thousands trembled in the scale, and the
fate of the flag of England staggered. And of
all this he had no more to say than " hot work,
sir," or " the army suffered a great deal, sir," or
" I believe General Wilson, sir, w^as not very highly
thought of in the papers." His life was naught to
him, the vivid pages of experience quite blank:
in words his pleasure lay — melodious, agitated
words — printed words, about that which he had
never seen and was connatally incapable of com-

BEGGARS 241

prehending. We have here two temperaments
face to face; both untrained, unsophisticated, sur-
prised (we may say) in the egg; both boldly char-
actered : — that of the artist, the lover and artificer
of words ; that of the maker, the seeer, the lover
and forger of experience. If the one had a
daughter and the other had a son, and these
married, might not some illustrious writer count
descent from the beggar-soldier and the needy
knife-grinder?

Ill

Every one lives by selling something, whatever

be his right to it. The burglar sells at the same

time his own skill and courage and my silver plate

(the whole at the most moderate figure) to a Jew

receiver. The bandit sells the traveller an article

of prime necessity: that traveller's life. And as

for the old soldier, who stands for central mark

to my capricious figures of eight, he dealt in a

specialty ; for he was the only beggar in the world

who ever gave me pleasure for my money. He

had learned a school of manners in the barracks

16

242 BEGGARS

and had the sense to cHng to it, accosting strangers
with a regimental freedom, thanking patrons with
a merely regimental difference, sparing you at once
the tragedy of his position and the embarrassment
of yours. There was not one hint about him of the
beggar's emphasis, the outburst of revolting grati-
tude, the rant and cant, the '' God bless you. Kind,
Kind gentleman," which insults the smallness of
your alms by disproportionate vehemence, which
is so notably false, which would be so unbearable
if it were true. I am sometimes tempted to sup-
pose this reading of the beggar's part, a survival of
the old days when Shakespeare was intoned upon
the stage and mourners keened beside the death-
bed; to think that we cannot now accept these
strong emotions unless they be uttered in the just
note of life; nor (save in the pulpit) endure these
gross conventions. They wound us, I am tempted
to say, like mockery; the high voice of keening
(as it yet lingers on) strikes in the face of sorrow
like a buffet; and the rant and cant of the staled
beggar stirs in us a shudder of disgust. But the
fact disproves these amateur opinions. The beggar

BEGGARS 243

lives by his knowledge of the average man. He
knows what he is about when he bandages his
head, and hires and drugs a babe, and poisons life
with Poor Mary Ann or Long, long ago; he knows
what he is about when he loads the critical ear and
sickens the nice conscience with intolerable thanks;
they know what they are about, he and his crew,
when they pervade the slums of cities, ghastly
parodies of suffering, hateful parodies of grati-
tude. This trade can scarce be called an imposi-
tion; it has been so blown upon with exposures;
it flaunts its fraudulence so nakedly. We pay
them as we pay those who show us, in huge ex-
aggeration, the monsters of our drinking-water;
or those who daily predict the fall of Britain. We
pay them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and
wince, and hurry on. And truly there is nothing
that can shake the conscience like a beggar's
thanks; and that polity in which such protesta-
tions can be purchased for a shilling, seems no
scene for an honest man.

Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine
beggars? And the answer is, Not one. My old

244 BEGGARS

soldier was a humbug like the rest; his ragged
boots were, in the stage phrase, properties; whole
boots were given him again and again, and always
gladly accepted ; and the next day, there he was on
the road as usual, with toes exposed. His boots
were his method; they were the man's trade;
without his boots he would have starved; he did
not live by charity, but by appealing to a gross taste
in the public, which loves the limelight on the
actor's face, and the toes out of the beggar's boots.
There is a true poverty, which no one sees : a false
and merely mimetic poverty, which usurps its place
and dress, and lives and above all drinks, on the
fruits of the usurpation. The true poverty does
not go into the streets; the banker may rest as-
sured, he has never put a penny in its hand. The
self-respecting poor beg from each other; never
from the rich. To live in the frock-coated ranks
of life, to hear canting scenes of gratitude re-
hearsed for twopence, a man might suppose that
giving was a thing gone out of fashion ; yet it goes
forward on a scale so great ct-s to fill me with sur-
prise. In the houses of the working class, all day

BEGGARS 245

long there will be a foot upon the stair; all day
long there will be a knocking at the doors ; beggars
come, beggars go, without stint, hardly with inter-
mission, from morning till night; and meanwhile,
in the same city and but a few streets off, the
castles of the rich stand unsummoned. Get the
tale of any honest tramp, you will find it was al-
ways the poor who helped him ; get the truth from
any workman who has met misfortunes, it was
always next door that he would go for help, or
only with such exceptions as are said to prove a
rule; look at the course of the mimetic beggar, it
is through the poor quarters that he trails his pas-
sage, showing his bandages to every window,
piercing even to the attics with his nasal song.
Here is a remarkable state of things in our Chris-
tian commonwealths, that the poor only should be
asked to give.

IV

There is a pleasant tale of some worthless,
phrasing Frenchman, who was taxed with ingrati-
tude : '^ // faut saz'oir garder rindcpcndance dii

246 BEGGARS

coeur," cried he. I own I feel with him. Gratitude
without famiharity, gratitude otherwise than as a
nameless element in a friendship, is a thing so near
to hatred that I do not care to split the difference.
Until I find a man who is pleased to receive obliga-
tions, I shall continue to question the tact of those
who are eager to confer them. What an art it is,
to give, even to our nearest friends ! and what a
test of manners, to receive! How, upon either
side, we smuggle away the obligation, blushing for
each other ; how bluff and dull we make the giver ;
how hasty, how falsely cheerful, the receiver ! And
yet an act of such difficulty and distress between
near friends, it is supposed we can perform to a
total stranger and leave the man transfixed watli
grateful emotions. The last thing you can do to
a man is to burthen him with an obligation, and it
is what we propose to begin with ! But let us not
be deceived : unless he is totally degraded to his
trade, anger jars in his inside, and he grates his
teeth at our gratuity.

We should wipe two words from our vocabu-
lary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is

BEGG.\RS 247

given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is
received from the hand of friendship, or it is re-
sented. We are all too proud to take a naked gift :
we must seem to pay it, if in nothing else, then with
the delights of our society. Here, then, is the piti-
ful fix of the rich man ; here is that needle's eye in
which he stuck already in the days of Christ, and
still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever:
that he has the money and lacks the love which
should make his money acceptable. Here and now,
just as of old in Palestine, he has the rich to
dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure :
and when his turn comes to be charitable, he looks
in vain for a recipient. His friends are not poor,
they do not want; the poor are not his friends,
they will not take. To whom is he to give?
Where to find — note this phrase — the Deserving
Poor? Charity is (what they call) centralised;
offices are hired; societies founded, with secre-
taries paid or unpaid : the hunt of the Deserving
Poor goes merrily forward. I think it will take
more than a merely human secretary to disinter
that character. What ! a class that is to be in want

248 BEGGARS

from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to
receive from strangers ; and to be quite respectable,
and at the same time quite devoid of self-respect;
and play the most delicate part of friendship, and
yet never be seen ; and wear the form of man, and
yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature :
— and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god
Burgess through a needle's eye! O, let him stick,
by all means : and let his polity tumble in the
dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of
which my own works begin to form no inconsider-
able part) be abolished even from the history of
man ! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness,
there can be no salvation : and the fool who looked
for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the
fool who looks for the Deserving Poor!

And yet there is one course which the unfor-
tunate gentleman may take. He may subscribe to
pay the taxes. There were the true charity, impar-
tial and impersonal, cumbering none with obliga-
tion, helping all. There were a destination for

BEGGARS 249

loveless gifts; there were the v/ay to reach the
pocket of the deserving poor, and yet save the time
of secretaries! But, alas! there is no colour of
romance in such a course; and people nowhere
demand the picturesque so much as in their
virtues.

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN
WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE
THE CAREER OF ART

WITH the agreeable frankness of youth,
you address me on a point of some
practical importance to yourself and (it
is even conceivable) of some gravity to the world:
Should you or should you not become an artist?
It is one which you must decide entirely for your-
self; all that I can do is to bring under your
notice some of the materials of that decision ;
and I will begin, as I shall probably conclude
also, by assuring you that all depends on the
vocation.

To know what you like is the beginning of
wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experi-
mental. The essence and charm of that unquiet
and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well
as ignorance of life. These two unknowns the
young man brings together again and again, now

A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 251

in the airiest touch, now with a bitter hug; now
with exquisite pleasure, now with cutting pain ;
but never with indifference, to which he is a total
stranger, and never with that near kinsman of
indifference, contentment. If he be a youth of
dainty senses or a brain easily heated, the interest
of this series of experiments grows upon him out
of all proportion to the pleasure he receives. It
is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that he
seeks, though he may think so ; his design and
his sufficient reward is to verify his own existence
and taste the variety of human fate. To him,
before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled, all
that is not actual living and the hot chase of
experience wears a face of a disgusting dryness
difficult to recall in later days; or if there be
any exception — and here destiny steps in — it is
in those moments when, wearied or surfeited of
the primary activity of the senses, he calls up
before memory the image of transacted pains
and pleasures. Thus it is that such an one
shies from all cut-and-dry professions, and in-
clines insensibly toward that career of art which

252 LETTER TO

consists only in the tasting and recording of
experience.

This, which is not so much a vocation for art
as an impatience of all other honest trades, fre-
quently exists alone; and so existing, it will pass
gently away in the course of years. Emphatically,
it is not to be regarded; it is not a vocation, but
a temptation; and when your father the other
day so fiercely and (in my view) so properly dis-
couraged your ambition, he was recalling not
improbably some similar passage in his own ex-
perience. For the temptation is perhaps nearly
as common as the vocation is rare. But again
we have vocations which are imperfect; we have
men whose minds are bound up, not so much in
any art, as in the general ars artiurn and common
base of all creative work; who will now dip into
painting, and now study counterpoint, and anon
will be inditing a sonnet : all these with equal
interest, all often with genuine knowledge. And
of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it
difficult to speak; but I should counsel such an
one to take to letters, for in literature (which

A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 2S3

drag's with so wide a net) all h's information
may be found some day useful, and 'f he should
go on as he has begun, and turn at last- into the
critic, he will have learned to use the necessary
tools. Lastly we come to those vocations which
are at once decisive and precise; to the men who
are born with the love of pigments, the passion
of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to
create with words, just as other and perhaps the
same men are born with the love of hunting, or
the sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These
are predestined; if a man love the labour of any
trade, apart from any question of success or fame,
the gods have called him. He may have the gen-
eral vocation too : he may have a taste for all
the arts, and I think he often has; but the mark
of his calling is this laborious partiality for one,
this inextinguishable zest in its technical successes,
and (perhaps above all) a certain candour of
mind, to take his very trifling enterprise w^ith a
gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and
to think the smallest improvement worth accom-
plishing at any expense of time and industry. The

254 T.ETTER TO

book, the staiue, the sonata, must be gone upon
with the u-'ireasoning good faith and the unflag-
ging spirit of children at their play. Is it zvorth
doinf, ? — when it shall have occurred to any artist
to ask himself that question, it is implicitly an-
swered in the negative. It does not occur to the
child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-
room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his
quarry; and the candour of the one and the ar-
dour of the other should be united in the bosom
of the artist.

If you recognise in yourself some such decisive
taste, there is no room for hesitation : follow your
bent. And observe (lest I should too much dis-
courage you) that the disposition does not usually
burn so brightly at the first, or rather not so con-
stantly. Habit and practice sharpen gifts; the
necessity of toil grows less disgusting, grows even
\velcome, in the course of years ; a small taste
(if it be only genuine) waxes with indulgence into
an exclusive passion. Enough, just now, if you
can look back over a fair interval, and see that
your chosen art has a little more than held its

A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 255

own among the thronging interess of youth.
Time will do the rest, if devotion hOo it; and
soon your every thought will be engrosser in that
beloved occupation. ^

But even with devotion, you may remind me,
even with unfaltering and delighted industry,
many thousand artists spend their lives, if the
result be regarded, utterly in vain : a thousand
artists, and never one work of art. But the vast
mass of mankind are incapable of doing anything
reasonably well, art among the rest. The w^orth-
less artist would not improbably have been a quite
incompetent baker. And the artist, even if he
does not amuse the public, amuses himself; so
that there will always be one man the happier
for his vigils. This is the practical side of art:
its inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner.
The direct returns — the wages of the trade —
are small, but the indirect — the wages of the
life — are incalculably great. No other business
offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful
terms. The soldier and the explorer have mo-
ments of a worthier excitement, but they are

256 lETTER TO

purchased by riuel hardships and periods of tedium
that' beg^'it language. In the hfe of the artist
there v.^d be no hour without its pleasure. I
take the author, with whose career I am best ac-
quainted; and it is true he works in a rebellious
material, and that the act of writing is cramped
and trying both to the eyes and the temper; but
remark him in his study, when matter crowds
upon him and words are not wanting — in what
a continual series of small successes time flows
by ; with what a sense of power as of one mov-
ing mountains, he marshals his petty characters;
with what pleasures, both of the ear and eye, he
sees his airy structure growing on the page; and
how he labours in a craft to which the whole
material of his life is tributary, and which opens
a door to all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, and
his convictions, so that what he writes is only
what he longed to utter. He may have enjoyed
many things in this big, tragic playground of the
world; but what shall he have enjoyed more
fully than a morning of successful work? Sup-
pose it ill paid : the wonder is it should be paid

A YOUNG GENTLKMAN 257

at all. Other men pay, and pay deariy, for pleas-
ures less desirable.

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure
only; it affords besides an admirable trai^iing.
For the artist works entirely upon honour. Ti?e
public knows little or nothing of those merits in
the quest of which you are condemned to spend the
bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design, the
merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a cer-
tain cheap accomplishment which a man of the
artistic temper easily acquires — these they can
recognise, and these they value. But to those
more exquisite refinements of proficiency and
finish, which the artist so ardently desires and
so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words
of Balzac) he must toil " like a miner buried in
a landslip," for which, day after day, he recasts
and revises and rejects — the gross mass of the
public must be ever blind. To those lost pains,
suppose you attain the highest pitch of merit, pos-
terity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so
probable, you fail by even a hair's breadth of the
l:ighest, rest certain they shall never be observed.

17

258 LETTER TO

Under the phadow of this cold thought, alone in
his studio, the artist must preserve from day to
day his constancy to the ideal. It is this which
makes his life noble; it is by this that the prac-
tice of his craft strengthens and matures his
character; it is for this that even the serious
countenance of the great emperor was turned ap-
provingly (if only for a moment) on the follow-
ers of Apollo, and that sternly gentle voice bade
the artist cherish his art.

And here there fall two warnings to be made.
First, if you are to continue to be a law to
yourself, you must beware of the first signs of
laziness. This idealism in honesty can only be
supported by perpetual effort ; the standard is easily
lowered, the artist who says " It will do,'' is on
the downward path ; three or four pot-boilers are
enough at times (above all at wrong times) to
falsify a talent, and by the practice of journalism
a man runs the risk of becoming wedded to cheap
finish. This is the danger on the one side; there
is not less upon the other. The consciousness of
how much the artist is (and must be) a law to

A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 259

himself, debauches the small heads. "' r i^,i-MT
recondite merits very hard to attain, m^ ', ,r
swallowing artistic formulae, or perhaps fain. ,^- in
love with some particular proficiency of his o.c;n,
many artists forget the end of all art : to please.
It is doubtless tempting to exclaim against the
ignorant bourgeois; yet it should not be for-
gotten, it is he who is to pay us, and that (surely
on the face of it) for services that he shall desire
to have performed. Here also, if properly con-
sidered, there is a question of transcendental hon-
esty. To give the public what they do not want,
and yet expect to be supported : we have there
a strange pretension, and yet not uncommon, above
all with painters. The first duty in this world is
for a man to pay his way; when that is quite
accomplished, he may plunge into what eccentri-
city he likes ; but emphatically not till then. Till
then, he must pay assiduous court to the bour-
geois who carries the purse. And if in the course
of these capitulations he shall falsify his talent,
it can never have been a strong one, and he will
have preserved a better thing than talent — char-

26o ^i^LETTER TO

acter. O' if he be of a mind so independent that
he car lot stoop to this necessity, one course is
yet r pen : he can desist from art, and follow some
mjre manly way of life.

I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a
point on which I must be frank. To live by a pleas-
ure is not a high calling; it involves patronage,
however veiled; it numbers the artist, however
ambitious, along with dancing-girls and billiard-
markers. The French have a romantic evasion
for one employment, and call its practitioners
the Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same
family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his trade
to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing
others, and has parted with something of the
sterner dignity of man. Journals but a little while
ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage; and
this Son of Joy was blamed for condescension
when he followed the example of Lord Lawrence
and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde. The poet was
more happily inspired; with a better modesty he
accepted the honour; and anonymous journalists
have not yet (if I am to believe them) recovered

A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 261

the vicarious disgrace to their profession. When
it comes to their turn, these gentlemen czn do
themselves more justice; and I shall be glaa.to
think of it; for to my barbarian eyesight, eveti
Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in
that assembly. There should be no honours for
the artist; he has already, in the practice of his
art, more than his share of the rewards of life;
the honours are pre-empted for other trades, less
agreeable and perhaps more useful.

But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to
fail to please. In ordinary occupations, a man
offers to do a certain thing or to produce a cer-
tain article with a merely conventional accom-
plishment, a design in which (we may almost
say) it is difficult to fail. But the artist steps
forth out of the crowd and proposes to delight:
an impudent design, in which it is impossible to
fail without odious circumstances. The poor
Daughter of Joy, carrying her smiles and finery
quite unregarded through the crowd, makes a
figure which it is impossible to recall without a
wounding pity. She is the type of the unsuc-

262 LETTER TO

cessful artist. The actor, the dancer, and the
singer must appear Hke her in person, and drain
puihcly the cup of failure. But though the rest
6f us escape this crowning bitterness of the pil-
lory, we all court in essence the same humilia-
tion. We all profess to be able to delight. And
how few of us are! We all pledge ourselves to
be able to continue to delight. And the day w^ill
come to each, and even to the most admired,
when the ardour shall have declined and the cun-
ning shall be lost, and he shall sit by his deserted
booth ashamed. Then shall he see himself con-
demned to do work for wdiich he blushes to take
payment. Then (as if his lot were not already
cruel) he must lie exposed to the gibes of the
wreckers of the press, who earn a little bitter
bread by the condemnation of trash which they
have not read, and the praise of excellence which
they cannot understand.

And observe that this seems almost the neces-
sary end at least of writers. Les Blancs et les
Blcits (for instance) is of an order of merit very
different from Le Vicomtc dc Bragelonnc ; and

A YOUNG GENTLEiAN 263

if any gentleman can bear to spy upon ii naked-
ness of Castle Dangerous, his name I ink is
Ham : let it be enough for the rest of us to fid
of it (not without tears) in the pages of Lockhart
Thus in old age, when occupation and comfort
are most needful, the writer must lay aside at
once his pastime and his breadwinner. The
painter indeed, if he succeed at all in engaging
the attention of the public, gains great sums and
can stand to his easel until a great age without
dishonourable failure. The writer has the double
misfortune to be ill-paid while he can work, and
to be incapable of working when he is old. It is
thus a way of life which conducts directly to a
false position.

For the writer (in spite of notorious examples
to the contrary) must look to be ill-paid. Tenny-
son and Montepin make handsome livelihoods ; but
we cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we do not
all perhaps desire to be Montepin. If you adopt
an art to be your trade, weed your mind at the
outset of all desire of money. What you may
decently expect, if you have some talent and much

264 LETTER TO

inclury, is such an income as a clerk will earn
wi.^ a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your ner-
::;us output. Nor have you the right to look for
more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages
of the trade, lies your reward ; the work is here
the wages. It will be seen I have little sympathy
with the common lamentations of the artist class.
Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field
labourer; or do they think no parallel will lie?
Perhaps they have never observed what is the re-
tiring allowance of a field officer; or do they
suppose their contributions to the arts of pleas-
ing more important than the services of a colonel?
Perhaps they forget on how little Millet was con-
tent to live; or do they think, because they have
less genius, they stand excused from the display
of equal virtues ? But upon one point there should
be no dubiety: if a man be not frugal, he has no
business in the arts. If he be not frugal, he steers
directly for that last tragic scene of Ic vicitx sal-
timbanque; if he be not frugal, he will find it
hard to continue to be honest. Some day, when
the butcher is knocking at the door, he may be

A YOUNG GENTLEM/^N 265

tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out .nd sell
a slovenly piece of work. If the obligation- shall
have arisen through no wantonness of his own,
he is even to be commended; for words canno'J
describe how far more necessary it is that a man
should support his family, than that he should
attain to — or preserve — distinction in the arts.
But if the pressure comes through his own faulty
he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and stolen
(which is the worst of all) in such a way that
no law can reach him.

And now you may perhaps ask me, if the debu-
tant artist is to have no thought of money, and
if (as is implied) he is to expect no honours from
the State, he may not at least look forward to
the delights of popularity? Praise, you will tell
me, is a savoury dish. And in so far as you
may mean the countenance of other artists, you
would put your finger on one of the most essen-
tial and enduring pleasures of the career of art.
But in so far as you should have an eye to the
commendations of the public or the notice of the
newspapers, be sure you would but be cherishing

266 A /OUNG GENTLEMAN

a drear- It is true that in certain esoteric jour-
nals -he author (for instance) is duly criticised,
an J that he is often praised a great deal more
Xhan he deserves, sometimes for qualities which
' he prided himself on eschewing, and sometimes
by ladies and gentlemen who have denied them-
selves the privilege of reading his work. But if
a man be sensitive to this wild praise, we must
suppose him equally alive to that which often
accompanies and always follows it — wild ridi-
cule. A man may have done well for years, and
then he may fail; he will hear of his failure.
Or he may have done well for years, and still do
well, but the critics may have tired of praising
him, or there may have sprung up some new
idol of the instant, some " dust a little gilt," to
whom they now prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is
the obverse and the reverse of that empty and
ugly thing called popularity. Will any man sup-
pose it worth the gaining?

i- \

2rS

^ ■

'L

PULVIS EX UMBRA

WE look for some reward of our en-
deavours and are disappointed; not
success, not happiness, not even peace
of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do
well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues bar-
ren; the battle goes sore against us to the going
down of the sun. The canting moralist tells us of
right and wrong; and we look abroad, even on
the face of our small earth, and find them change
with every climate, and no country where some
action is not honoured for a virtue and none where
it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our
experience, and find no vital congruity in the
wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness. It
is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good.
We ask too much. Our religions and moralities
have been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all
emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please

■S

PU LVIS ET U M BRA

. weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the
.arsh face of hfe, faith can read a bracing gospel.
The human race is a thing more ancient than the
ten commandments ; and the bones and revolutions
of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss
and fungus, more ancient still.

Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports
many doubtful things and all of them appalling.
There seems no substance to this solid globe on
which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios.
Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth
and beat us down; gravity that swings the incom-
mensurable suns and worlds through space, is but
a figment varying inversely as the squares of dis-
tances; and the suns and worlds themselves, im-
ponderable figures of abstraction, NHg and H2 O.
Consideration dares not dwell upon this view;
that way madness lies; science carries us into
zones of speculation, where there is no habitable
city for the mind of man.

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as

PULVIS ET UMBRi. v 2cS

■ * "*) ■

our senses give it us. We behold space sown
rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the sha.
and wrecks of systems : some, like the sun, stiL
blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like
the moon, stable in desolation. All of these \\q
take to be made of something w^e call matter: a
thing which no analysis can help us to conceive;
to whose incredible properties no familiarity can
reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified
by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into some-
thing we call life ; seized through all its atoms with
a pediculous malady; swelling in tumours that
become independent, sometimes even (by an ab-
horrent prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into
millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady
proceeds through varying stages. This vital pu-
trescence of the dust, used as w^e are to it, yet
strikes us with occasional disgust, and the pro-
fusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the
air of a marsh darkened with insects, will some-
times check our breathing so that we aspire for
cleaner places. But none is clean : the moving
sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where

.^ULVIS ET UMBRA

rsts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of
rms; even in the hard rock the crystal is
lorming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the
countenance of the earth : the animal and the vege-
table: one in some degree the inversion of the
other : the second rooted to the spot ; the first
coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurry-
ing abroad with the myriad feet of insects or
towering into the heavens on the wings of birds :
a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well con-
sidered, the heart stops. To what passes with the
anchored vermin, we have little clue: doubtless
they have their joys and sorrows, their delights and
killing agonies: it appears not how. But of the
locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can
tell more. These share with us a thousand mir-
acles : the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the
projection of sound, things that bridge space;
the miracles of memory and reason, by which the
present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image
kept living in the brains of man and brute; the
miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires

PULVIS ET UMBRA v ^^rS

and staggering consequences. And to put the la. , ^ .
touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting
and the inconceivable, all these prey upon each
other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming
them inside themselves, and by that summary
process, growing fat : the vegetarian, the whale,
perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the
desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the
dumb.

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with pre-
datory life, and more drenched with blood, both
animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship,
scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and
turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a
blazing world, ninety million miles away.

II

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the
disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate
feet or lying drugged with slumber ; killing, feed-
ing, growing, bringing forth small copies of him-
self; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with
eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to

PU LV I S ET UMBRA

t children screaming; — and yet looked at near-
lier, known as his fellows know him, how sur-
prising are his attributes ! Poor soul, here for so
little, cast among so many hardships, filled with
desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent,
savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irre-
mediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives :
who should have blamed him had he been of a
piece with his destiny and a being merely bar-
barous? And we look and behold him instead
filled with imperfect virtues : infinitely childish,
often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind ;
sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate
of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity ;
rising up to do battle for an Qgg or die for an idea ;
singling out his friends and his mate with cordial
afifection ; bringing forth in pain, rearing with
long-sufTering solicitude, his young. To touch the
heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought,
. strange to the point of lunacy : the thought of
-^- duty; the thought of something owing to himself,
to his neighbour, to his God : an ideal of decency,
to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit

N 2cS

P U L V I S E T UMBRA .V^

of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will no\ i, \
stoop. The design in most men is one of con-
formity; here and there, in picked natures, it
transcends itself and soars on the other side, arm-
ing martyrs with independence ; but in all, in their
degrees, it is a bosom thought : — Not in man
alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we
know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point
of honour sways the elephant, the oyster, and the
louse, of whom we know so little : — But in man,
at least, it sways with so complete an empire that
merely selfish things come second, even with the
selfish : that appetites are starved, fears are con-
quered, pains supported; that almost the dullest
shrinks from the reproof of a glance, although it
were a child's ; and all but the most cowardly stand
amid the risks of war ; and the more noble, having
strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal,
affront and embrace death. Strange enough if,
with their singular origin and perverted practice,
they think they are to be rewarded in some future
life : stranger still, if they are persuaded of the

contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit,

iS

I PULVIS ET U M B RA

\vill strike them senseless for eternity. I shall be
reminded what a tragedy of misconception and
misconduct man at large presents : of organised
injustice, cowardly violence, and treacherous crime;
and of the damning imperfections of the best.
They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed
marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But
where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold
more remarkable that all should continue to strive ;
and surely we should find it both touching and
inspiriting, that in a field from which success is
banished, our race should not cease to labour.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his
rotatory isle, be a thing to shake the courage of
the stoutest, on this nearer sight, he startles us
with an admiring wonder. It matters not where
we look, under what climate we observe him, in
what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance,
burthened with what erroneous rnorality ; by camp-
fires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoul-
ders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits,
passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his
grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at

PULVIS ET UMBRA ^ ^^^'^

sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleastu ^
his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a be-
dizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he
for all that simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like
a child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for others ;
in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
millions to mechanical employments, without hope
of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in
the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest jipL.
to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted per-
haps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long-
suffering with the drunken wife that ruins him ;
in India (a woman this time) kneeling with broken
cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her child
in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of
society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with
affronts, a fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and
even here keeping the point of honour and the
touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn
with service, often standing firm upon a scruple,
and at a certain cost, rejecting riches : — every-
where some virtue cherished or affected, every-
where some decency of thought and carriage,

PULVIS ET UMBRA

/erywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual good-
ness:— ah! if I could show you this! if I could
show you these men and women, all the world
over, in every stage of history, under every abuse
of error, under every circumstance of failure,
without hope, without help, without thanks, still
obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still
clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some
rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls ! They
may seek to escape, and yet they cannot ; it is not
alone their privilege and glory, but their doom ;
they are condemned to some nobility; all their
lives long, the desire of good is at their heels, the
implacable hunter.

Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most
strange and consoling: that this ennobled lemur,
this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor
of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny him-
self his rare delights, and add to his frequent
pains, and live for an ideal, however misconceived.
Nor can we stop with man. A new doctrine, re-
ceived with screams a little while ago by canting
moralists, and still not properly worked into the

PULVIS ET UMBRA \ ^2r5

body of our thoughts, lights us a step farther iiic.
the heart of this rough but noble universe. For
nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his kin-
ship with the original dust. He stands no longer
like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see the
dog, prince of another genus : and in him too, we
see dumbly testified the same cultus of an unat-
tainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does
it stop with the dog? We look at our feet where
the ground is blackened with the swarming ant:
a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy
of brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce com-
prehend his doings; and here also, in his ordered
polities and rigorous justice, we see confessed the
law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does
it stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of
well-doing and this doom of frailty run through
all the grades of life : rather is this earth, from the
frosty top of Everest to the next margin of the
internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and
one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The
whole creation groaneth and travaileth together.
It is the common and the god-like law of life. The

. PULVIS ET UMBRA

orowsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats
of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the
thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share
with us the gift of life, share with us the love of an
ideal : strive like us — like us are tempted to grow
weary of the struggle — to do well ; like us receive
at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of sup-
port, returns of courage; and are condemned like
us to be crucified between that double law of the
members and the will. Are they like us, I wonder,
in the timid hope of some reward, some sugar with
the drug ? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded
virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our
partiality, we take to be just, and the prosperity
of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked? It
may be, and yet God knows what they should look
for. Even while they look, even while they repent,
the foot of man treads them by thousands in the
dust, the yelping hounds burst upon their trail, the
bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den of
the vivisectionist ; or the dew falls, and the gen-
eration of a day is blotted out. For these are
creatures, compared with whom our weakness

PULVIS ET UMBRA ->^'^

is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief spai. '
eternity.

And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of
terror and under the imminent hand of death, God
forbid it should be man the erected, the reasoner,
the wise in his own eyes — God forbid it should
be man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs of
unrewarded effort, or utters the language of com-
plaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole
creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with
unconquerable constancy : surely not all in vain.

A CHRISTMAS SERMON

BY the time this paper appears, I shall have
been talking for twelve months ; ^ and it
is thought I should take my leave in a for-
mal and seasonable manner. Valedictory elo-
quence is rare, and death-bed sayings have not
often hit the mark of the occasion. Charles Sec-
ond, wit and sceptic, a man wdiose life had been
one long lesson in human incredulity, an easy-
.'ping comrade, a manoeuvring king — remem-
bered and embodied all his wit and scepticism
along with more than his usual good-humour in
the famous '' I am afraid, gentlemen, I am an un-
conscionable time a-dying."

I

An unconscionable time a-dying — there is the
picture (''I am afraid, gentlemen,'') of your life
and of mine. The sands run out, and the hours

1 /. e. in the pages of Scribner^s Magazine (1888).

A CHRISTMAS SERMON \^2rS

are " numbered and imputed," and the days g v
by; and when the last of these finds us, we have
been a long time dying, and what else? The very
length is something, if we reach that hour of sepa-
ration undishonoured ; and to have lived at all is
doubtless (in the soldierly expression) to have
served. There is a tale in Tacitus of how the
veterans mutinied in the German wilderness ; of
how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouring to go
home; and of how, seizing their general's hand,
these old, war-worn exiles passed his finger along
their toothless gums. Sunt lacrymce rertim: this
was the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon.
And when a man has lived to a fair age, he bears
his marks of service. He may have never been
remarked upon the breach at the head of the army ;
at least he shall have lost his teeth on the camp
bread.

The idealism of serious people in this age of
ours is of a noble character. It never seems to
them that they have served enough ; they have a
fine impatience of their virtues. It were perhaps
more modest to be singly thankful that we are no

. A CHRISTMAS SERMON

a'orse. It is not only our enemies, those des-
perate characters — it is we ourselves who know
not what we do ; — thence springs the glimmer-
ing hope that perhaps we do better than wx think :
that to scramble through this random business with
hands reasonably clean, to have played the part
of a man or woman with some reasonable fulness,
to have often resisted the diabolic, and at the end
to be still resisting it, is for the poor human sol-
dier to have done right well. To ask to see some
fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way
of serving for reward; and what we take to be
contempt of self is only greed of hire.

And again if we require so much of ourselves,
shall we not require much of others? If we do
not genially judge our own deficiencies, is it not
to be feared we shall be even stern to the tres-
passes of others? And he who (looking back upon
his own life) can see no more than that he has
been unconscionably long a-dying, will he not be
tempted to think his neighbour unconscionably
long of getting hanged ? It is probable that nearly
all who think of conduct at all, think of it too

A CHRISTMAS SERMON 'X^^rS

much ; it is certain we all think too much of sin. ^'
We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not
doing right; Christ would never hear of negative
morality; thou shalt was ever his word, with
which he superseded thou shalt not. To make our
idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to
defile the imagination and to introduce into our
judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of
gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we should not
dwell upon the thought* of it; or we shall soon
dwell upon it with inverted pleasure. If we can-
not drive it from our minds — one thing of two :
either our creed is in the wrong and we must more
indulgently remodel it; or else, if our morality be
in the right, we are criminal lunatics and should
place our persons in restraint. A mark of such
unwholesomely divided minds is the passion for
interference with others : the Fox without the Tail
was of this breed, but had (if his biographer is to
be trusted) a certain antique civility now out of
date. A man may have a flaw, a weakness, that
unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils his tem-
per, that threatens his integrity, or that betrays

/ A CHRISTMAS SERMON

him into cruelty. It has to be conquered; but it
must never be suffered to engross his thouglits.
The true duties lie all upon the farther side, and
must be attended to with a whole mind so soon as
this preliminary clearing of the decks has been
effected. In order that he may be kind and honest,
it may be needful he should become a total ab-
stainer; let him become so then, and the next day
let him forget the circumstance. Trying to be
kind and honest will require all his thoughts ; a
mortified appetite is never a wise companion; in
so far as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will
still be the worse man ; and of such an one a great
deal of cheerfulness will be required in judging
life, and a great deal of humility in judging
others.

It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with
our life's endeavour springs in some degree from
dulness. We require higher tasks, because we do
not recognise the height of those we have. Trying
to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple
and too inconsequential for gentlemen of our
heroic mould; we had rather set ourselves to

A CHRISTMAS SERMON . 2r5

something bold, arduous, and conclusive; we hal
rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut
off a hand or mortify an appetite. But the task
before us, which is to co-endure with our existence,
is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the hero-
ism required is that of patience. There is no cut-
ting of the Gordian knots of life; each must be
smilingly unravelled.

To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and
to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a
family happier for his presence, to renounce when
that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to
keep a few friends but these without capitulation
— above all, on the same grim condition, to keep
friends with himself — here is a task for all that
a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an
ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a
hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise
to be successful. There is indeed one element in
human destiny that not blindness itself can con-
trovert : whatever else we are intended to do, we
are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate
allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so

/a CHRISTMAS SERMON

above all in the continent art of living well. Here
is a pleasant thought for the year's end or for the
end of life: Only self-deception will be satisfied,
and there need be no despair for the despairer.

II

But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of
another year, moving us to thoughts of self-exam-
ination: it is a season, from all its associations,
whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts
of joy. A man dissatisfied with his endeavours is
a man tempted to sadness. And in the midst of
the winter, when his life runs lowest and he is
reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved, it
is well he should be condemned to this fashion of
the smiling face. Noble disappointment, noble
self-denial are not to be admired, not even to be
pardoned, if they bring bitterness. It is one thing
to enter the kingdom of heaven maim ; another to
maim yourself and stay without. And the king-
dom of heaven is of the childlike, of those who are
easy to please, who love and who give pleasure.
Mighty men of their hands, the smiters and the

A CHRISTMAS SERMON i 2rS

builders and the judges, have Hved long and done
sternly and yet preserved this lovely character;
and among our carpet interests and twopenny con-
cerns, the shame were indelible if zue should lose
it. Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before
all morality; they are the perfect duties. And it
is the trouble with moral men that they have
neither one nor other. It was the moral man, the
Pharisee, whom Christ could not away with. If
your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they
are wrong. I do not say " give them up," for they
may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice,
lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler
people.

A strange temptation attends upon man : to
keep his eye on pleasures, even when he will not
share in them ; to aim all his morals against them.
This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) pro-
claimed a crusade against dolls; and the racy
sermon against lust is a feature of the age. I
venture to call such moralists insincere. At any
excess or perversion of a natural appetite, their
lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations;

/ A CHRISTMAS SERMON

but for all displays of the truly diabolic — envy,
malice, the mean lie, the mean silence, the calum-
nious truth, the backbiter, the petty tyrant, the
peevish poisoner of family life — their standard
is quite different. These are wrong, they will
admit, yet somehow not so wrong; there is no
zeal in their assault on them, no secret element of
gusto warms up the sermon ; it is for things not
wTong in themselves that they reserve the choicest
of their indignation. A man may naturally dis-
claim all moral kinship with the Reverend Mr.
Zola or the hobgoblin old lady of the dolls; for
these are gross and naked instances. And yet in
each of us some similar element resides. The sight
of a pleasure in which w'e cannot or else will not
share moves us to a particular impatience. It may
be because we are envious, or because we are sad,
or because we dislike noise and romping — being
so refined, or because — being so philosophic — we
have an overweighing sense of life's gravity : at
least, as we go on in years, we are all tempted
to frown upon our neighbour's pleasures. People
are nowadays so fond of resisting temptations;

A CHRISTMAS SERMON . 2r5

here is one to be resisted. They are fond of sell .,
denial ; here is a propensity that cannot be too
peremptorily denied. There is an idea abroad
among moral people that they should make their
neighbours good. One person I have to make
good : myself. But my duty to my neighbour is
much more nearly expressed by saying that I have
to make him happy — if I may.

Ill

Happiness and goodness, according to canting
moralists, stand in the relation of effect and cause.
There was never anything less proved or less prob-
able: our happiness is never in our own hands;
we inherit our constitution ; we stand buffet among
friends and enemies ; we may be so built as to feel
a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness, and
so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to
them ; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain,
and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue
will not help us, and it is not meant to help us. It
is not even its own reward, except for the self-
centred and — I had almost said — the unamiable.

19

J^ A CHRISTMAS SERMON

bMo man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be
what he want, he shall do better to let that organ
perish from disuse. And to avoid the penalties of
the law, and the minor capitis diminutio of social
ostracism, is an affair of wisdom — of cunning, if
you will — and not of virtue.

In his own life, then, a man is not to expect
happiness, only to profit by it gladly when it shall
arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how or
why, and does not need to know ; he knows not for
what hire, and must not ask. Somehow or other,
though he does not know what goodness is, he
must try to be good ; somehow or other, though
he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give
happiness to others. And no doubt there comes in
here a frequent clash of duties. How far is he
to make his neighbour happy? How far must he
respect that smiling face, so easy to cloud, so hard
to brighten again? And how far, on the other
side, is he bound to be his brother's keeper and
the prophet of his own morality? How far must
he resent evil?

The difficulty is that we have little guidance;

A CHRISTMAS SERMON ^'^

Christ's sayings on the point being hard to recon
cile with each other, and (the most of them) hard
to accept. But the truth of his teaching would
seem to be this: in our own person and fortune,
we should be ready to accept and to pardon all ;
it is our cheek we are to turn, otir coat that we are
to give away to the man who has taken our cloak.
But when another's face is buffeted, perhaps a little
of the lion will become us best. That we are to
suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not
conceivable and surely not desirable. Revenge,
says Bacon, is a kind of w^ild justice ; its judgments
at least are delivered by an insane judge; and in
our own quarrel we can see nothing truly and do
nothing wisely. But in the quarrel of our neigh-
bour, let us be more bold. One person's happiness
is as sacred as another's; when we cannot defend
both, let us defend one with a stout heart. It is
only in so far as we are doing this, that we have
any right to interfere : the defence of B is our
only ground of action against A. A has as good a
right to go to the devil, as we to go to glory ; and
neither knows what he does.

.56/ A CHRISTMAS SERMON

The truth is that all these interventions and
denunciations and militant mongerings of moral
half-truths, though they be sometimes needful,
though they are often enjoyable, do yet belong to
an inferior grade of duties. Ill-temper and envy
and revenge find here an arsenal of pious dis-
guises; this is the playground of inverted lusts.
With a little more patience and a little less temper,
a gentler and wiser method might be found in
almost every case; and the knot that we cut by
some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or,
in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against
what w^e are pleased to call our neighbour's vices,
might yet have been unwoven by the hand of
sympathy.

IV

To look back upon the past year, and see how
little we have striven and to what small purpose;
and how often we have been cowardly and hung
back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and
how every day and all day long we have trans-
gressed the law of kindness ; — it may seem a

A CHRISTMAS SERMON 2cS

paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoverit
a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed
to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his
long business most of the time with a hanging
head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of
rewards and pleasures as it is — so that to see the
day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend,
or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills
him with surprising joys — this world is yet for
him no abiding city. Friendships fall through,
health fails, weariness assails him ; year after
year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of
his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly pro-
cess of detachment. When the time comes that he
should go, there need be few illusions left about
himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a
littl^, failed much: — surely that may be his epi-
taph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will
ae complain at the summons which calls a defeated
sodier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were

, Paul or Marcus Aurelius! — but if there is still
one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured.

|The faith which sustained him in his life-long

^ ^4 A CHRISTMAS SERMON

blindness and life-long disappointment will r ^ •'^"
even be required in this last formality of layi.'^ •*
down his arms. Give him a march with his old
bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured
earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstas}/
— there goes another Faithful Failure !

From a recent book of verse, where there is morq|E
than one such beautiful and manly poem, I take
this memorial piece : it says better than I can, what
I love to think; let it be our parting word.

" A late lark twitters from the quiet skies ;
And from^the west,
Where the sun, his day's work ended,
Lingers as in content,
There falls on the old, grey city
An influence luminous and serene,
A shining peace.

*' The smoke ascends
In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires
Shine, and are changed. In the valley
Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,
Closing his benediction.
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night —
Night, with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.

A CHRISTMAS SERMON 295

,-- A ^o be my passing!

My task accomplished and the long day done,

My wages taken, and in my heart

Some late lark singing,

Let me be gathered to the quiet west,

The sundown splendid and serene,

Death." i

1 From A Book of Verses by William Ernest Henley. D. Nutt,

888.

[1888.]

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